Question

Prof. Orlando Karam maintains an Ubuntu Linux server for his class. Every semester he needs to create an account for each student. It takes a lot of time to create these accounts one by one interactively. So he decides to automate the process by writing a script. You are Orlando’s TA and volunteered to complete the task. Please propose a solution and write a script (either Bash or Perl) to implement your solution. Basic requirements:  The script reads from a CSV file for student information (exported from Excel). The file is made up of the lines like this: Jack,Zheng,jzheng3 //[first name],[last name],[campus email id] Mark,Cuban,mcuban2 …  Please make up your own CSV file (with at least 5 students/lines) for testing purpose.  Every student is assigned a common initial password (you will determine the password).  Students are required to change their passwords at first login.  All student accounts should be assigned to a “student” group. This group already exists in the system (you need to create this group first for testing purpose).  Make some other assumptions if not specifically required. Reminder: you will and should do some research on how to read and parse CSV files, and how to process passwords programmatically. Execute your script and take two screen shots: a. The “passwd” file content, with the new accounts clearly shown. b. The “shadow” file content, with the new accounts clearly shown. 2. Login with one of the new student account and show that you have successfully logged in using the newly created account. Take a screen shot showing the user id in the terminal. 3. Compile one PDF document with the script, the CSV file content, and all three screen shots, clearly labeled for each part.

Answer 1

student.csv file

john   paul   jpaul12
mark   andre   mandre23
chris   vincent   cvincent34
mary   renolds   mrenolds45
tim   cook   tcook56

Bash Script :

#!/bin/bash

if [ $# -eq 0 ]
then
   echo "Usage : new_student.sh student_file.csv"
   exit 1
fi

student_file=$1
for line in `cat $student_file`
do
   fname=`echo $line | cut -d',' -f1`
   lname=`echo $line | cut -d',' -f2`
   id=`echo $line | cut -d',' -f3`
   sudo adduser $id --gecos "$fname $lname" --disabled-password
   echo "$id:password" | sudo chpasswd #default password as "password"
   sudo usermod -a -G student $id
done

Outputs :

Script Execution

Contents of passwd file

Contents of shadow file

logging in to a new user and changing the password