How to instantiate Linux user accounts so that they can safely be reused? [closed]

Question

Let's say I have 10 user accounts. I want that users logged in will use an instance of that account not the account itself.

So when they log in, they will work on a copy of that account that should be dropped as soon as they log out. if two or more users are using the same account, they should not be able to see each other's files.

If they return to that account they should the initial state.

Answer 1

What goal are you trying to accomplish?

What you're describing is generally not useful (the only case I can ever see where it would be useful is on a public-access unix system where you let people log in as "guest" and they get redirected to a guest1234 account which gets deleted when they log out. You can implement such a horrible thing with PAM modules or some hackery to the login binary, but it's generally a Bad Idea, and therefore left as an exercise for the reader.

Answer 2

You're Doing It Wrong

It's tough to completely accomplish such a thing. There's all sorts of hacks that you could try, such as:

---

Add to login script:

NEWHOME=$(mkdir $HOME/.tmphome.XXXXXX)
export HOME=$NEWHOME
(spawn rest of session)

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And that would get you most of the way there.

Or perhaps, have everyone log ssh a single meta-guest account that:

• locks the semaphore
• picks the next unused guest account
• re-initializes that guest account (wipes out files, etc)
• uses ssh/sudo/whatever to change to that guest account
• unlocks the semaphore