Question

I try to run the following bash script to create a bunch of users, groups, home dirs for the users and correct permissions for all of these. The OS is CentOS.

When I try to run the following, which I though should work, it returns “command not found” when running via terminal. it only gets as far as creating the /homedirs directory, nothing more. I’m a total noob at bash scripting so forgive me if this looks ugly.

mkdir /homedirs; chmod 775 /homedirs;

for iYear in {1..3} do
    sYear = $iYear"ti"
    sYearDir = "/homerirs/"$sYear
    groupadd $sYear; mkdir $sYearDir; chgrp $sYear $sYearDir; chmod 750 $sYearDir

    for sClass in {a,b} do
        sClassDir = $sYearDir/$sClass
        mkdir $sClassDir
        sClassGrp = $sYear$sClass
        groupadd $sClassGrp; chgrp $sClassGrp $sClassDir; chmod 750 $sClassDir

        for iUser in {1..3} do
            sUserName = "i"$iYear$sClass"g"$iUser
            sUserDir = $sClassDir/$sUserName
            useradd -d $sUserDir -g $sClassGrp -G $sYear -m $sUserName
            chown $sUserName $sUserDir; chmod 750 $sUserDir
        done
    done
done

Answer 1

The error message is caused by the spaces around the equals signs. A token with whitespace after it is interpreted as a command name; so what you intended as variable names causes the Command not found errors.