I have a script I run on my mail server when deleting a user. This script just backs up the users data / account info before running the 'userdel' command in case there is any issues that come up post deletion. My reason for this post is simple. I know nothing about shell scripts yet and would like someone to look at this script and tell me if it looks OK or can be simplified for better function / perforamce and secondly...when I delete their account and it begins to create a tarball, can I also add to the tarball the users /etc/passwd & /etc/shadow entry so if I restore, I still have their old login info?

Thanks for any assistance:

#!/bin/bash

USERNAME=$1
HOMEDIR=/home/$USERNAME
BACKUPDIR=/var/backup
DATESTAMP=$(date +%m-%d-%Y_%H-%M)

if [ -d /home/$USERNAME ]; then
echo "* Backing up home directory to $BACKUPDIR:"
tar jcf $BACKUPDIR/$USERNAME-$DATESTAMP.tar.bz2 /home/$USERNAME
echo "--------------------------------------------------"
echo "* Removing user home directory - /home/$USERNAME:"
rm -rf /home/$USERNAME
echo "--------------------------------------------------"
fi

echo "* Checking alias files for entries:"
ALIASFILES=$(ls /etc/*alias* | grep -v '\.db' | grep -v '\.orig')
for f in $ALIASFILES; do
grep -H $USERNAME $f
done
echo "--------------------------------------------------"
userdel $USERNAME

Hello Carlwill

You might need to do something different if the user may have files outside /home/<username> (ignoring transient files that will be removed anyway, such as files in /tmp).

If there is a possibility that the user may be re-instated it is better to disable than to delete. That way you reserve both their user name and user ID. This can be done, for example, by replacing their login shell in /etc/passwd with /dev/null. If you take this advice there is no need to add their /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow records to the tarball.

Thank you for prettying the script with a fixed pitch font; you can also use the # icon to format text as CODE.

Performance is not an issue -- unless you are deleting thousands of users?!

Critiquing the script ...

Safer (and easy) to get the users' home directory by ~<username> rather than assume it's /home/<username>.

It would be safer to examine the return code from tar (check the value of $?) before removing the home directory.

If the [ -d /home/$USERNAME ] test fails it would be helpful to have an else clause giving an error message.

There may be other places that user-specific data is kept; the only one I can bring to mind is the samba password database.

Best

Charles