You could also look at finger $LOGNAME finger returns more info than just full name, so would take a bit more filtering, e.g: finger $LOGNAME | awk '/Name: / {print $5, $4}' On the other hand it could capture networked users who are not listed in the local passwd file.

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Thank you very much guys, you have been awesome. This helped me so much

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when i use $user or $USER in the shell script, it doesn't work, the code only worked when i actually hard code the users login name into the script. Am i doing something wrong. Sorry, I'm only a n00b

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It might depend on the shell you're using or the platform you're on. Try $LOGNAME.

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Is there any way I can display the user name in the format SURNAME, FIRSTNAME Sorry, I should of asked that originally.

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The name of the shell script can be displayed from the script. SCRIPTNAME="`basename $0`" echo "Name of script is: ${SCRIPTNAME}"

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Set USERNAME to the LOGNAME you want to process, then ... cat /etc/passwd|grep \^${USERNAME}: | \ awk -F: '{print $5}' | awk '{print $2,$1}' Inefficient but reliable! The grep starts with "^" and ends with ":" to to stop false matches e.g. smith and smithy. First awk in the pipe is delimited ":". Second awk is delimited space. Enjoy.

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