[ILUG] Changing a users home directory with passwd

[Mel]

On Mon, 20 May 2002, Niall O Broin wrote:

> Not sure if this is what you want but perl will do EXACTLY the above with
> this one liner:
>
> perl -pi -e "s^/home/guest^/local/guest^" /etc/passwd
>

At the risk of confusing the issue, using that type of approach is
generally a bad idea. why? Because it doesn't take into account that all
your passwd information might not be local as is the case with NIS with yp
or ldap backends. If available, always use the tool which uses
nsswitch.conf to solve the problem. In this case, chsh

Besides, in a fit of been a pendant because it's 2 in the morning and I'm
in literal mode, the above one-liner will match lines that have guest as a
subset of the username like guestftp, guestshell, guestsamba, guesttemp
and so on. Unlikely he has such users, but possible

 --
Mel Gorman
MSc Student, University of Limerick
http://www.csn.ul.ie/~mel