Bash Script help

[ToriAnneke]

Hi all,

I'm getting confused with Login Hooks (either OS X or Casper's), Schedule Tasks or LaunchD item.
Need to make a script that will remove ~/Library/Preferences/extensis.plist from every user on a Mac once a month, every month at 9am.
I've been at it all day and just can't figure it out.. So many different ways of doing it… A friend of mine suggested a Python script… I was like "What what what??!!" So not sure how to tackle it.

I'm sure it's a simple script but everything I'm Googling seems so convoluted.

Thanks in advance!!!

--
Pat Camporeale
"From now on I will be referred to as Mister Pastulio"
Herengracht 258
1016BV Amsterdam

[Jak]

Scheduled task

-------

#!/bin/bash

shortname=stat -f '%u %Su' /dev/console | awk '{print $2}'

rm /Users/"$shortname"/Library/Preferences/extensis.plist

----

Unless I'm missing something?

[jonscott]

Or loop through all home folders, something along the lines of:

cd /Users
for account in *
do rm /Users/$account/Library/Preferences/extensis.plist
done

Schedule it with a launchd item...


[sean]

You say 'all' users.

If the users all are in /Users, then there is no reason you shouldn't be able to do

rm /Users/*/Library/Preferences/extensis.plist

However, this isn't the tidiest, since Shared wont have a file of this, but it wont stop the script running.

To be neater, you could run

ls -1 | grep -v Shared | while read line

and run the rm command for that file.

ls -1 | grep -v Shared | while read line
do rm /Users/"$line"/Library/Preferences/extensis.plist
done

For a more elegant solution, you would actually check to see if the file existed before removing!

It'll be something like:

ls -1 | grep -v Shared | while read line
do if [ -f /Users/"$line"/Library/Preferences/extensis.plist ] then rm /Users/"$line"/Library/Preferences/extensis.plist fi
done

Haven't tested this, but it should work!

If your users are network users, then clearly this is going to need handled differently.

You can then either use a policy to trigger this or write your own launchd item to run the script. For launchd, google StartInterval and StartCalendarInterval


[tlarkin]

+elenty billion for scheduled task via launchd

my method

#!/bin/bash

userList=$(dscl . list /Users UniqueID | awk '$2 > 500 { print $1 }')

for u in ${userList} ; do

rm /Users/${u}/Library/Preferences/extensis.plist
done exit 0

This will loop through all users with UID greater than 500

-Tom