[Tutor] automatic account destruction

[jb]

On Sun, Apr 18, 2004 at 02:09:00AM -0400, Kirk Bailey wrote:
> I give people free email accounts. From time to time, I have the task 
> of searching for abandoned accounts and removing them, which is a time 
> consuming chore. This is a bother, world class. So I am building a 
> script which opens the first line of every email popbox and extracts 
> the first line. This is formatted as:
> "From idiot1 at netzero.net Fri Nov 9 00:30:27 2001"
> (quotemarks mine, not found in data)
> and I must crunch as needed to turn it into SECONDS SINCE THE EPOCH.

you can use the os.stat function to do something similar (with the st_ctime
field) without reading the file.  st_ctime is in seconds since the epoch, if
i remember correctly.

> I then add a magic number to it (the number of seconds in 2 months), 
> and compare it to NOW. If that sum is smaller than NOW, the message is 
> VERY OLD, and we assume the account is abandoned, and delete it. We 
> repeat this loop for every popbox in the directory, which contains 
> nothing else BUT mailboxes, glob.glob('*.') to the rescue here.
> 
> This script is still in alpha stage, but I thought the list may find 
> the process to do this crunching intresting.
> 
> I am unsure how to have a script run a su function. Sure,
> os.system('rmuser'+filename)
> comes to mind, but will FreeBSD accept such commands from a script 
> running as a cronjob?

if you really want that you can run such a script in root' crontab, or
use sudo and a (NOPASSWD) option.  however, running rmuser automatically
seems a bit scary!  i would advocate the use of a confirmation step 
somewhere in this process :)

> I will post the incomplete script on the tinylist site. Click THIS
> http://www.tinylist.org/abandontest.txt
> to view it.
> 
> Please keep in mind this script is untested as of yet and can use LOTS 
> of work, and I welcome advice. As always, it is COPIOUSLY commented.
>