Locating Missing Home Directories?

carlosinfl · 05-20-2008, 01:43 PM

I appear to have a script that had a missing parameter. It would remove all the users files / folders / including their home directory but did not delete them from /etc/skel and /etc/passwd.

So for like 2 months I thought I was deleting users and I was basically just deleting all their data but leaving their UID and GID info on the server.

Can I do a search for all users on the system who have a missing /home/user_dir?

SlowCoder · 05-20-2008, 02:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Carlwill

I appear to have a script that had a missing parameter. It would remove all the users files / folders / including their home directory but did not delete them from /etc/skel and /etc/passwd.

So for like 2 months I thought I was deleting users and I was basically just deleting all their data but leaving their UID and GID info on the server.

Can I do a search for all users on the system who have a missing /home/user_dir?

/etc/skel is a directory that is copied to a new user's home directory when the account is created. It doesn't have any user-specific information in it. So it wouldn't change when you remove a user.

Can't you just edit your /etc/passwd file and remove the old accounts?

jay73 · 05-20-2008, 04:32 PM

There will probably be some leftovers in /tmp and /var/mail as well.

carlosinfl · 05-20-2008, 04:52 PM

Code:

while read -r usr dir; do [[ -d $dir ]] || echo "$usr dir not present: $dir"; done < <(awk -F":" ' $6 ~ /home/ { print $1,$6 }' /etc/passwd)

This gave me exactly what I was asking for in case anyone needs this in the future...

SlowCoder · 05-20-2008, 04:58 PM

Glad you could find your solution. And thank you for sharing it with us!