i'm toying around with shell script. my plan is to read the /etc/passwd file extracting the usernames and feeding the usernames to chage to find out how all users are set up. i've got a count of the entire file just for grins. i can cat the file to awk and get the names but i cannot get the names to pipe to chage -l and display each users profile.

script as of now:
#!/bin/sh
n=`cat /etc/passwd |wc -l `
echo $n "number of users"
cat /etc/passwd | awk -F: '{print $1}'

any ideas?

Use xargs to take the output of the awk command. I don't know what change itself is capable of, but I assume change -l lists profile info. xargs takes the resulting wordlist and does the next command against each item one at a time:

cat /etc/passwd | awk -F: '{print $1}' | xargs change -l

From the man command:

NAME
chage - change user password expiry information

SYNOPSIS
chage [-m mindays] [-M maxdays] [-d lastday] [-I inactive]
[-E expiredate] [-W warndays] user

chage -l user

DESCRIPTION
chage changes the number of days between password changes and the date
of the last password change. This information is used by the system to
determine when a user must change her password. The chage command is
restricted to the root user, except for the -l option, which may be
used by an unprivileged user to determine when her password or account
is due to expire.

So who can use the command may be affecting what's going on.

Typing in

awk -F: '{print $1}' /etc/passwd

is sufficient to list ALL accounts in the passwd file, but I'm not really sure that's what you'd want to do. Many of the accounts are really interfaces to special purpose events, like shutdown, bin, daemon, and other accounts specifically intended not as login accounts, but to serve as interfaces to specific functions. In fact, on my system, there are only really two login accounts that I know of, root and masinick, yet there are

wc -l /etc/passwd
24 /etc/passwd

24 entries in the file.

So a good solution to this problem, in my estimation, would be to weed out the unnecessary accounts. Run whatever shell you develop from root, then it should work properly with chage - 'change age'... hmm, should I run chage on myself? LOL