[Techtalk] help with python script for batch useradd

[Aaron Malone]

On Tuesday 06 January 2004 13:21, Carla Schroder wrote:
> This was written by Aaron Malone, who used to hang out here.

And decided to rejoin the list and see what was going on these days. :)

Actually, the script I gave you should work fine for that unaltered.  
It actually uses ':' as the separator character between username and 
realname, so if you have, say:
carlas:Carla Schroder,,,,foo
as input, it should add you as:
useradd -m -c "Carla Schroder,,,,foo" carlas

The bug you may hit there is if someone has a colon in their GECOS/
realname field.  This can be fixed by changing line 24 to:
    username, realname = line.split(':', 1)

The extra argument to string.split is the 'maxsplit' -- that is, it'll 
only split that line once, so you don't have to worry about further 
colons in the input.
-- 
Aaron Malone
aaron at munge.net