question on script

[holocene]

how do I get a list of all users in /etc/passwd into a variable that I can iterate through. Reason: I want to do something based on the value of each user.

For example, if my list of users was $userlist, then I want to do something like this:

for myuser in $userlist
do
some work here on $myuser
done

I know I can use cut like this
cat /etc/passwd | cut -f1 -d:
which gives me one user per line.

but how do I get it into a variable?

for instance, this does not work
userlist=(cat /etc/passwd | cut -f1 -d:)

Thanks in advance. Sorry if this is not the right forum.
Steve.

[lostinxlation]

If you want to do something only in that foreach loop, this works too.




#!/bin/csh

foreach tmp (`cat /etc/passwd | sed -e 's/:.*$//' `)
echo $tmp
end



If you really want to put them into a variable, do like



#!/bin/csh

set x = `cat /etc/passwd | sed -e 's/:.*$//' `

foreach tmp ($x)
echo $tmp
end


NOTE: Above code is based on C shell, not a Bourne Shell variant. I'd guess you can do the similar thing with bash.

[holocene]

lostinxlation,

Thanks for the response.

Based on your csh hint, I got it to work in bash like this

myusers=$(cat /etc/passwd | sed -e 's/:.*$//' )

for username in $myusers
do
echo "this iteration is $username"
done

Great forum.
Steve.