Help for the new system manager

[Win Treese]

In article <1693 at ucqais.uc.edu>, rainwatr at ucqais.uc.edu (Donald J. Rainwater) writes:
>
> 	First, is there a system-wide login/profile/whatever for CSH?  We've
> found /etc/profile for SH, but no /etc/login (like on SysV?).  Surely some-
> one out there has developed an alternative if there isn't already a system
> login file.  Anyone have any suggestions?

csh doesn't have one.  The easiest thing is to give the users .login and .cshrc files that
source your system-wide ones, though that risks users editing them out.

Of course, if you have source code, you can change csh to use a system-wide file.  I've
seen it done; the changes are minimal.

> 	Second, is it possible to prompt the user for input from a csh
> script?  (Something like 'read' in sh).  We need to be able to do this in
> the aforementioned system-wide login script.

You do something like

	echo -n "Type something interesting: "
	set foo = ($<)

$< expands to a line of input.

> 	Finally, we have a (potentially) large number of users.  Being a
> university, our list of users is constantly changing.  Also, it's rather
> difficult to assign usernames that are both unique and simple for the users.
> We've come up with one or two ideas for this, but would like to know what
> some other sites are using.  Our VMS systems use social security numbers,
> along with a class code, but Unix won't allow that type of setup with only
> eight characters.

MIT's Project Athena used the scheme of first initial, middle initial, plus the
last name (if 6 characters or fewer, the first 6 characters if not).  This generates
some interesting usernames, but they are almost always unique.  They are
generally easy for the user who owns it to remember it, but it's often non-mnemonic
for someone else -- although the VMS scheme is less mnemonic for both, I would think.

Good luck with it.

Win Treese						Cambridge Research Lab
treese at crl.dec.com					Digital Equipment Corp.