First off, you need to know where the user lives, ask the system with getpwnam and friends. Then try to mount the home dir. It's up to your system's /etc/fstab (and by fstab, nsswitch as you may use NIS+ or something)

use User::pwent;

my $username = 'f00li5h';
my $user = getpwnam($username);

printf "%s aka (%s) lives in %s $/",
       $user->name, $user->gecos, $user->dir;

#f00li5h aka (f00li5h and5illy) lives in /home/f00li5h

use File::Spec;
my @paths = File::Spec->splitdir( $user->dir );

# start at the most specific directory (/home/f00li5h) head 
# to the lest specific (/)
while( @paths ){
    # get the system to mount (rather than just print)
    printf "mount %s $/", File::Spec->catdir( @paths );
    last if -d $user->dir; # stop looking when the dir turns up
    pop @paths ;
}
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This has massive massive YMMV attached to it and I'm sure there's a better way than blindly mounting things until the homedir appears, particularly if the user's homedir is with a symlink of some sort.

/home/f00li5h -> /media/homes/big/f00li5h
[download]

Hello,

Could you please share the pertinent portion(s) of your script with us so that we see where to integrate the requested check?

Although users don't necessarily have home directories mounted on each system, do their home directories definitely match their usernames? (for instance username = dana and home directory = /home/dana).

Easiest would be a statement in the system's SHELL rc (.profile, .bashrc, whatever) like

cd $HOME || exit
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_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}

Hi,

Thanks for the replies. Previously, the last line of my code was this:-

$Launch = system ("rsh $BestHost");

...where $BestHost was derived earlier. Now, however, I am just going to do this:-

$Launch = system ("rsh $BestHost \"cd ~$user\"");

...and if I detect a "not found", I will move to the next best machine name.

Thanks for all the replies!

Kind Regards,

Kehliah

> How can I perform a simple check to make sure a user's home directory is mounted to a specific system?

sub has_mounted_home {
    my $uid = shift || die 'Wrong Parameters!\n';

    my @userinfo = getpwnam("$uid");
    # $uid not found:
    return if @userinfo == 0;

    my $local_homedir = $userinfo[7];

    # perhaps use Linux::Mounts instead of:
    my $mount_result  = `/bin/mount | /bin/grep $local_homedir`;

    # needs improvement because /homes/user1 will match e.g. /homes/us
+er12 ...
    return $mount_result ne ""; 
}

foreach my $uid ('uid1', 'uid2', 'uid3') {
    print "$uid has a mounted home\n" if has_mounted_home($uid);
}
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/bin/mount will print out that /home is mounted but trying to match "/home/f00li5h" against "/dev/wd0k on /home type ext2fs (local)" will not match, unless every single user's homedir is a it's own mount point... has_mounted_home() won't work for user's who's homedirs are below mount points...

it all depends on which solution is more sensible for your unique set of mountpoints

@_=qw; ask f00li5h to appear and remain for a moment of pretend better than a lifetime;;s;;@_[map hex,split'',B204316D8C2A4516DE];;y/05/os/&print;