User account management script in Bash Scripting - Mini Project: Build & Apply

User account management script

📖 Scenario: You are a system administrator who needs to manage user accounts on a Linux server. You want to automate the process of checking user accounts and their statuses.

🎯 Goal: Create a Bash script that stores a list of user accounts with their statuses, sets a status filter, filters the users based on that status, and then prints the filtered list.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create an associative array called users with usernames as keys and their statuses as values.

Create a variable called filter_status to hold the status to filter users by.

Use a for loop to iterate over the users array and select users whose status matches filter_status.

Print the filtered usernames and their statuses.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

System administrators often need to manage user accounts and their statuses on servers. Automating this with scripts saves time and reduces errors.

💼 Career

Knowing how to write scripts for user account management is valuable for roles in IT support, system administration, and DevOps.

1

Create the user accounts data

Create an associative array called users with these exact entries: alice with status active, bob with status inactive, carol with status active, and dave with status inactive.

Bash Scripting

# Create the associative array users with usernames and statuses
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use declare -A users to create an associative array in Bash.

2

Set the status filter

Create a variable called filter_status and set it to the string active.

Bash Scripting

declare -A users=( [alice]=active [bob]=inactive [carol]=active [dave]=inactive )
# Set the filter_status variable to 'active'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the string active to the variable filter_status.

3

Filter users by status

Use a for loop with the variable user to iterate over the keys of the users array. Inside the loop, use an if statement to check if the user's status matches filter_status. If it matches, add the user and their status to a new associative array called filtered_users.

Bash Scripting

declare -A users=( [alice]=active [bob]=inactive [carol]=active [dave]=inactive )
filter_status="active"
# Create an empty associative array filtered_users
declare -A filtered_users=()
# Use a for loop to iterate over users and filter by filter_status
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use for user in "${!users[@]}" to loop over keys of an associative array.

4

Print the filtered users

Use a for loop with the variable user to iterate over the keys of the filtered_users array. Inside the loop, print the username and their status in the format: user: status.

Bash Scripting

declare -A users=( [alice]=active [bob]=inactive [carol]=active [dave]=inactive )
filter_status="active"
declare -A filtered_users=()
for user in "${!users[@]}"; do
    if [[ "${users[$user]}" == "$filter_status" ]]; then
        filtered_users[$user]="${users[$user]}"
    fi
done
# Print each user and their status from filtered_users
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use echo "$user: ${filtered_users[$user]}" inside the loop to print each filtered user.