[nflug] for the crafty scripter

[Cyber Source]

Hello All,
  In tweaking the latest Gusty Gibbon, I have run into a problem that 
was driving me nuts (don't reply with the corny joke about that saying 
Bob, heard it a hundred times ;)). Anywho, this distro absolutely ROCKS. 
Cmon, plugins on the fly?? If I were an M$ stock holder, I would be 
sell, sell, sell.
  OK, I thought I found a bug in Gutsy but it turns out to be a problem 
with the way I would do things. Problem was, I found that I could NOT 
add a user via the users-admin app. It would create the group but 
nothing in /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow. Did some googling, found nothing 
exactly similar. What I did find is that if I don't put anything in 
/etc/skel, I could create the user just fine. If I put some things in 
/etc/skel, I could still create the user. However, if, like I would in 
the past do a (while in /home/peter) "tar cf - . | (cd /etc/skel && tar 
xf -)", I could NOT create the user after, it would show the added user 
until I closed and reopened the app, but no /home/newuser would be made, 
no entry in passwd or shadow, only the group would be added. I would do 
this so I could edit my /home with all the tweaks I wanted and then the 
added user would have all the same settings, with a couple of 
modifications needed after. However, as in Edgy, this does not work 
anymore for whatever reason, there must be something in my hidden 
folders or files that is pissing off the mechanism or users-admin in 
/etc/skel.
Workaround then in Edgy was to just tar up the /home/peter, create the 
new user, remove his home and untar and use that for his home, changing 
the name and ownerships of course, all was good.
HOWEVER, this method still works but causes other problems now in that 
it appears a lot more files seem to have the old instance and reference 
to /home/peter, where it should be now /home/newuser. If I grep the 
files for all instances of /home/peter, I see alot more than it use to, 
before it was mainly a problem with firefox, as it would have a hard 
link in one of the files to the previous owner.
  SO, still here? For those with long attention spans....My question is 
this. Since I can't seem to find ANY docs on /etc/skel and the tricks 
that may be used and/or a way to duplicate a users whold environment, as 
this really cuts down on my time when adding new users, etc..

What would be a command that I could find all instances of "/home/peter" 
in all the files of the new users and change them to "/home/newuser"? As 
this seems to be the easiest method I can think of. Thoughts? Ideas?


p.s. One of the reasons for this, was that I noticed that while logged 
into the new user, a new screen saver, called Picture Folder, was 
displaying random pics from web sites that I went to while logged in as 
peter. No, no porn but it got me to thinking, this little screensaver 
could be a real embarrassment to some people, lol. NOTE: They still 
showed, even though before I created the new user from peter, I had 
cleared the history, so it's caching the pics somewhere else.

Ok, done. TIA