Linux: Delete Expired Accounts? [closed]

Question

I am writing a script to create users and put them in the correct groups for FTP etc. Part of the script allows you to set an expiration date.

Could someone help me out with creating a script that would be able to run via cron each night and delete expired accounts and their home dirs?

Thanks. Pete.

Answer 1

Simple, stupid implementation in Ruby you'll probably have to improve.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'time'
$stdin.lines.each do |line|
  time, account = line.split ','
  home_directory = %x[getent passwd #{account}].split(':')[-2] # useless?
  if Time.now.to_i > Time.parse(time).to_i
    %x[rm -fr #{home_directory}] # useless?
    %x[userdel #{account}]
  end

Note that most modern userdel implementations have a -r switch that will take care of removing the home directory and spool for you. By using it you can get rid of the lines marked with # useless?.

Call this /usr/sbin/remove-expired and call it with /usr/sbin/remove-expired < /etc/accounts, where each line in /etc/accounts contains an expiration date for the account and the account name, separated by a colon.

For example:

2012-10-06:jack
May 12, 2015:john