Linux – Check to see if a directory exists remotely (shell script)

Pure Bash Solution, using parameter expansion. See this for an explanation of PE.

foo='date-web2-v.7.052509.csv'
file=${foo%*.csv}
date=${file##*.}

month=${date:0:2}
day=${date:2:2}
year=${date:4:2}

I would probably use Perl for this and use parenthesis to capture what I want in groups from a regular expression.

This might sound like a silly idea, but if the users aren't actually doing anything, you could do:

cat /etc/passwd | cut -f 1 -d : >/tmp/users.list

Then edit /tmp/users.list to only contain the users you want. Then do:

for i in `cat /tmp/users.list`
do
    userdel $i
    useradd -m $i
done

However, many Redhat based distributions will create you a new home directory when you first login, providing it is specified in /etc/passwd where the directory should be.

To test that, do an "su - " and see if it does "the right thing". If it doesn't, the above script will work quite nicely, I think.