Hi,

I am attempting to do some piping with the finger and awk commands and am having some difficulty.

I am trying to search for a user name and if it is available print something to the screen like This user name is available. Specifically, trying to get a "no", from no such user, and insert an elif statement into a script to display that the username is available.)

I've done a little research on it, but I am still having difficulty.

Here is what I have done so far. (attempting to pull a "no")

1st - several attempts:
$finger l | awk '{print $3}'
finger: l: no such user.

w/ backticks
finger joe `awk '{print $3}'`
...no feedback...

w/backticks
finger joe | `awk '{print $3}'`
finger: joe: no such user.

Am I missing something? I also tried sending a -F option to awk and specifying a ":" as a separator, but that didn't work either.

Any ideas?

Thanks

# ./loggedon tux

Result:
tux is logged in!

I copied and pasted the lines you provided...

#!/bin/sh

RESULT=`finger | grep $1 | wc -l | awk '{print $1}'`

if [ "$RESULT" -ne 0 ];
then
echo "$1 is logged in!"
else
echo "$1 is NOT logged in!"
fi


and received the following output...
tux@mudpie:~/Desktop/> ./test1
Usage: grep [OPTION]... PATTERN [FILE]...
Try `grep --help' for more information.
is NOT logged in!

Did I miss something here?

thanks

When you execute the shell script, the $1 means use the first argument provided along with the script. For example.

# ./test tux

That will execute the script "test" and look for the user "tux" and display how many times tux is logged in. You have to provide an arugment with the script. Thats why you are getting that error.

What does the -ne 0 mean in the script?

Does it mean if the commands in the variable RESULT return something not equal to 0 then the username exists?

Thanks ckoniecny,

I didn't catch the execution on the top line of your post. I am working on modifying it to fit what I am looking for.

Thanks again,
-Me

Yes cramer, thats exactly what it means.