Asianet Dataline is an ISP in Kerala and they use a web browser based authentication system to log the user onto their network. One of their most popular plans the - Homenet 475 offers free unlimited downloads from 2AM to 8AM. Now if there was a way to turn on your system at 2AM, automatically login to Asianet and turn your download manager on and then shutdown at 8AM it would have been perfect. The only problem is that the http based authentication system makes it a bit unwieldy to automate. Well not really :-). We have created a bash script to automate this login process.

Recently we had to provide support on a Red Hat Server where there were hundreds of users and the user directories organized into hierarchies. Normally we change to a users directory using cd ~username. We had some extra time on our hands and wanted to play with the /etc/passwd file and tried to use awk to do the same thing. The following one liner will do this the hard way :-)