Prof. Orlando Karam maintains an Ubuntu Linux server for his class. Every semest

Question

Prof. Orlando Karam maintains an Ubuntu Linux server for his class. Every semester he needs to create an account for each student. It takes a lot of time to create these accounts one by one interactively. So he decides to automate the process by writing a script.
You are Orlando’s TA and volunteered to complete the task. Please propose a solution and write a script (either Bash or Perl) to implement your solution. Basic requirements:
The script reads from a CSV file for student information (exported from Excel). The file is made up of the lines like this: Jack,Zheng,jzheng3 //[first name],[last name],[campus email id] Mark,Cuban,mcuban2 …
Please make up your own CSV file (with at least 5 students/lines) for testing purpose.
Every student is assigned a common initial password (you will determine the password).
Students are required to change their passwords at first login.
All student accounts should be assigned to a “student” group. This group already exists in the system (you need to create this group first for testing purpose).
Make some other assumptions if not specifically required. Reminder: you will and should do some research on how to read and parse CSV files, and how to process passwords programmatically

Explanation / Answer

#!/bin/bash
input="/path/to/your/input/file.cvs"
# Set "," as the field separator using $IFS
# and read line by line using while read combo
while IFS=',' read -r f1 f2 f3
do
echo "$f1 $f2 $f3 "
f4=$f1$f2
/usr/sbin/useradd -G Student $f4
pwd=kalam$(echo "$f3")
echo $pwd | passwd $f4
chage -d 0 $f4
done < "$input"

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