I hope somebody could help me with a couple of things...

First, I would like to search the /etc/passwd file for the full name of a user given his/her username. i've tried the following command:

cat etc/passwd | grep -w '`whoami`' | cut -f 5 -d ':'

of course that didn't work as grep interprets whoami as a string, not as a command becuase of the ' '.

So does anyone know how i can get over this problem?

Second, i have a text file that contains a names of items, the price, and the date it was purchased. The content looks something like this:

t-shirt|20|-
socks|10|2004-12-10
shoes|40|2004-12-10

the item name, price and date are separated by '|' and the '-' denotes that the item wasnt purchased yet

So what i need to do here is to echo the unpurchased items and then the purchased items, i used grep to do this and it worked.

But to add, what i needed was to add a number before each item as it is displayed on the screen, something like this:

UNpurchased items:

1. tshirt 20

purchased items:

1. socks 10
2. shoes 40

they also need to be aligned as shown, can anyone show me how to do this? Help would be very mush appreciated.

Sincerely,
marco83

thanks plavania, im just a newbie in unix so will this script also work in bash?

marco83