ssh to different nodes using shell scripting - linux

Question

I am using below code to ssh to different nodes and find if an user exists or not. If the user doesn't exist it will create it.
The script works fine if I don't do ssh but it fails if I do ssh.
How can I go through different nodes using this script?
for node in `nodes.txt`
usr=root
ssh $usr#$node
do
if [ $(id -u) -eq 0 ]; then
read -p "Enter username : " username
read -s -p "Enter password : " password
egrep "^$username" /etc/passwd >/dev/null
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
echo "$username exists!"
exit 1
else
pass=$(perl -e 'print crypt($ARGV[0], "password")' $password)
useradd -m -p $pass $username
[ $? -eq 0 ] && echo "User has been added to system!" || echo "F
ailed to add a user!"
fi
else
echo "Only root may add a user to the system"
exit 2
fi
done

Answer 1

Your script has grave syntax errors. I guess the for loop at the beginning is what you attempted to add but you totally broke the script in the process.
The syntax for looping over lines in a file is
while read -r line; do
.... # loop over "$line"
done <nodes.txt
(or marginally for line in $(cat nodes.txt); do ... but this has multiple issues; see http://mywiki.wooledge.org/DontReadLinesWithFor for details).
If the intent is to actually run the remainder of the script in the ssh you need to pass it to the ssh command. Something like this:
while read -r node; do
read -p "Enter user name: " username
read -p -s "Enter password: "
ssh root#"$node" "
# Note addition of -q option and trailing :
egrep -q '^$username:' /etc/passwd ||
useradd -m -p \"\$(perl -e 'print crypt(\$ARGV[0], \"password\")' \"$password\")" '$username'" </dev/null
done <nodes.txt
Granted, the command you pass to ssh can be arbitrarily complex, but you will want to avoid doing interactive I/O inside a root-privileged remote script, and generally make sure the remote command is as quiet and robust as possible.
The anti-pattern command; if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then ... is clumsy but very common. The purpose of if is to run a command and examine its result code, so this is better and more idiomatically written if command; then ... (which can be even more succinctly written command && ... or ! command || ... if you only need the then or the else part, respectively, of the full long-hand if/then/else structure).

Answer 2

Maybe you should only do the remote tasks via ssh. All the rest runs local.
ssh $user#$node egrep "^$username" /etc/passwd >/dev/null
and
ssh $user#$node useradd -m -p $pass $username
It might also be better to ask for username and password outside of the loop if you want to create the same user on all nodes.