Write a program called home that takes the name of a user as its single argument and prints that user's home directory. Specifically

Question

home steve
should print
/users/steve
if /users/steve is steve's home directory. (Hint: Recall that the home directory is the sixth field stored in the file /etc/passwd.)

Answer 1

There are a number of ways to accomplish this, here's a solution that uses cut:
grep "^$1\:" /etc/passwd | cut -d: -f6