Wicked Cool Shell Scripts

#48 Cleaning Up After Guests Leave

Although many sites disable the guest user for security reasons, others do have a guest account (often with a trivially guessable password) to allow people from other departments to access the network. It's a useful account, but there's one big problem: With multiple people sharing the same account, it's not uncommon for someone to experiment with commands, edit .rc files, add subdirectories, and so forth, thereby leaving things messed up for the next user.

This script addresses the problem by cleaning up the account space each time a user logs out from the guest account, deleting any files or subdirectories created, removing all dot files, and then rebuilding the official account files, copies of which are ...