Discussion of the Userids File for Experts

The magic Userids file

The "magic" Userids file, /software/accounts-userids/data/Userids has its master copy maintained on cs-xh-admin.cs.private.uwaterloo.ca .

New userids which appear in the Extract are added to the Userids file. Userids are never automatically removed from the Userids file; it is a permanent historical record. But that fact allows you to safely add userids before they appear in the Extract file (which happens only once a day).

Format of the file consists of 4 colon-separated fields; id-number(s), userid(s), real name and comments. The first two fields can contain multiple values, separated by commas.

E.g.

    72193421,11116733,e39929453,hr225521,19931104-djhobbscap,P-69221:djhobbscap,ccng.hobbscap:Hobbscap, David J:2010/Jul/08 - UWdir

If you edit the Userids file by hand, then afterwards use the check_userids command to ensure consistency. The file must be maintained in its appropriate sorted order. Typically you will want to add a record which will correspond to what update_userids will create the next morning.

The following will reveal several records which had special id-numbers indicating that the accounts are special non-humans, and not in WatIAM.

    grep -v '^[^:][^:][^:]' /software/accounts-userids/data/userids | \\
       awk -F: '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

-- AdrianPepper - 19 Oct 2011

Referers

• IncludeSponsorsDataCreatingUserids