I have inherited the administration over a SUN Sparc Solaris machine
on a school. This machine has 2800 userids defined and only 1500 of
them are in use. How can I easily delete, (perlscript maybe?) my
surplus of 1300 userid from the NIS databases. I have managed to
compile a list of userids that can be removed so the input can be
read from file. Can you please point me in the right direction as
to how I can do that. Or better yet have a ready solution for me.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Peter Berkhout.

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On 2005-09-02, discussie@vandehoedenderand.nl wrote:
> I have inherited the administration over a SUN Sparc Solaris machine
> on a school. This machine has 2800 userids defined and only 1500 of
> them are in use. How can I easily delete, (perlscript maybe?) my
> surplus of 1300 userid from the NIS databases. I have managed to
> compile a list of userids that can be removed so the input can be
> read from file. Can you please point me in the right direction as
> to how I can do that. Or better yet have a ready solution for me.

Make the entries in the file of the format:

^USERNAME1:
^USERNAME2:

If you just have the names by themselves, a simple awk script can
fix them:

awk '{printf "^%s:\n", $1}' FILE > FILENAME

And use:

grep -Evf FILENAME /var/yp/shadow > newshadow
mv newshadow /var/yp/shadow

Then build the NIS database.

On an older Solaris you may have to use egrep instead of grep -E.

Adjust file names to taste.

--
Chris F.A. Johnson                     <http://cfaj.freeshell.org>
 ========================================
==========================
Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach, 2005, Apress
<http://www.torfree.net/~chris/books/cfaj/ssr.html>

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Thank you very much for this solution. I will try this first thing
mondaymorning.
Do I need to do the same with /var/yp/passwd? Or will the makefile for
building the NIS database take charge of that?

Thanks again.

Regards,
Peter Berkhout.

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I did the task this mornig. All went well. To answer my own question.
Yes the same has to be done with the passwd file.
Thanks again.
Regards,
Peter Berkhout

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