Re: traverse through passwd file, and split fields to extract UID/GID

[kcott]

G'day intoperl,

Welcome to the monastery.

There's builtin functions to do this. No need to reinvent this particular wheel. Try this from your command line:

$ perldoc -f getpwent

[intoperl]

Thanks Ken, for bringing up getpwent. BTW, i used the other approach which did not mention getpwent, but still the job was done, by the code below :

my $HAN = "handle";
my $FILE = "passwd.txt";
open("$HAN", "$FILE")||die "Error opening file: $!\n";

while(<$HAN>) {
my ($name,$passwd,$uid,$gid,$gcos,$dir,$shell) = split(/:/,$_);
print "UID is: $uid\n";
print "GID is: $gid\n";

}

close("$HAN");

[kcott]

"Thanks Ken, for bringing up getpwent. BTW, i used the other approach which did not mention getpwent, but still the job was done, ..."

You're welcome. I'm glad you found a working solution.

For future reference, all of that code could have been replaced by:

while (my @pw = getpwent) {
    printf "UID is: %s\nGID is: %s\n", @pw[2,3]
}

By the way, take a look at open for better ways of doing: open("$HAN", "$FILE")