home directory

[Gordon Messmer]

Todd Denniston wrote:
> Craig White wrote, On 12/19/2008 12:03 PM:
>> getent passwd | grep $1 | awk -F: '{ print $6 }'
...
> Thanks for that getent call suggestion, it simplifies one of my scripts 
> greatly.


The grep is useless, and should be discouraged.  Use something like this 
instead:

getent passwd "$1" | awk -F: '{ print $6 }'
or:
getent passwd "$1" | cut -d: -f6

Calling "getent passwd" on a machine that uses LDAP as an NSS source 
causes a full search of the directory, which can be very expensive on 
large directories.  It's better not to make a habit of doing that.

Plus, the "grep" method fails if the username that you're searching for 
is a substring of other usernames in the passwd database.