adding usernames and passwords in linux

[paublo]

hi i dont know much about perl so im hoping someone can help me.

i have a billing system that creates users on a linux mail server with a perl script. the billing system passed 2 values, the username and password to the script.

the script creates the username and places the users's home fir in /home/$username.

what i want to do is have it place the user in /home/1st letter of username/$username. I would like the home dir letter never to be in caps.


the pl script im using has these lines

#!/usr/bin/perl

open(INFILE, "@ARGV[0]");
$infile = <INFILE>;
($username,$password) = split(/\|/, $infile);
close(INFILE);

@calladduser = ("/usr/sbin/adduser $username -g 503 -d /home/$letter/$username -s /sbin/nologin -p $password","\n");
system("@calladduser");

@cryptpasswd = ("echo $password | passwd $username --stdin");
system("@cryptpasswd");

what can i do on this script that will place the 1st letter of the username in $letter.

Thanks for all your help.

 

[feherke]

Hi

what can i do on this script that will place the 1st letter of the username in $letter.

$letter=substr $username,0,1;

Feherke.

http://rootshell.be/~feherke/

 

[paublo]

thank you for your response i will try that but i also found a script that i forgot about using
my ($firstletter) = $username =~ /^(.)/;
which works.

thanks for the reply.

p

 

[rharsh]

what i want to do is have it place the user in /home/1st letter of username/$username. I would like the home dir letter never to be in caps.

You might want to look at the lc function for that.

 

[KevinADC]

my ($firstletter) = $username =~ /^(.)/;

It works and its probably the least efficient way to do something like that. The most efficient way to get the first character from a sting into a variable is unpack():

my $first = unpack ("A1", $string);

Combine that with lc() and you have what you need in a fast and efficient manner:

my $first = lc(unpack ("A1", $string));

regular expressions are for searching/matching patterns, they are powerful but less efficient tools when all you need to do is some simple string processing.

------------------------------------------
- Kevin, perl coder unexceptional!

 

[paublo]

thanks kevin, ill use that instead