[ILUG] Changing a users home directory with passwd

[Philip Reynolds]

kevin lyda's [kevin at ie.suberic.net] 31 lines of wisdom included:
> On Tue, May 21, 2002 at 02:04:49AM +0100, Mel wrote:
> > On Mon, 20 May 2002, Niall O Broin wrote:
> > > perl -pi -e "s^/home/guest^/local/guest^" /etc/passwd
> > 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
> 
> yes.
> 
> > 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
> 
> yes, but easily solved:
> 
>     perl -pi -e 's":/home/guest(:[^:]*)$":/local/guest$1"' /etc/passwd
> 
> but chsh or other solutions are better.

chsh or usermod being the preferred way, whatever approach you
should use, let it be standardised and it should have locking. Don't
have one person do it one way and have another do it another.

-- 
  Philip Reynolds        
   RFC Networks          tel: 01 8832063
www.rfc-networks.ie      fax: 01 8832041