ldapsearch and vcard creation

Question

I'm using openldap on Mac OS X Server 10.6 and need to generate a vcard for all the users in a given group. By using the ldapsearch I can list all the memberUid's for all users in that group. I found a perl script (Advanced LDAP Search or ALS) that was written by someone that will generate the vcard easily. ALS can be found here http://www.ldapman.org/tools/als.gz

So what I need to do is create a wrapper script (in python or perl) that will effectively loop through the memberUid's and run the ALS command to create the vcard and append it to the file.

This command provides the memberUid's:

ldapsearch -x -b 'dc=ldap,dc=server,dc=com' '(cn=testgroup)'

Then running ALS gives the vcard:

als -b dc=ldap,dc=server,dc=com -V uid=aaronh > vcardlist.vcf

If it's easier to do this using Perl since ALS is already using it that would be fine. I've done more work in python but I'm open to suggestions.

Thanks in advance, Aaron

EDIT:

Here is a link to the Net:LDAP code that I have to date. So far it pulls down the ldap entries with all user information. What I'm missing is how to capture just the UID for each user and then push it into ALS.

http://www.queencitytech.com/net-ldap

Here is an example entry (after running the code from the above link):

#-------------------------------
DN: uid=aaronh,cn=users,dc=ldap,dc=server,dc=com
  altSecurityIdentities : Kerberos:[email protected]
  apple-generateduid : F0F9DA73-70B3-47EB-BD25-FE4139E16942
  apple-imhandle : Jabber:[email protected]
  apple-mcxflags : <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"&gt;
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>simultaneous_login_enabled</key>
    <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

  authAuthority : ;ApplePasswordServer;0x4c11231147c72b59000001f800001663,1024 35 131057002239213764263627099108547501925287731311742942286788930775556419648865483768960345576253082450228562208107642206135992876630494830143899597135936566841409094870100055573569425410665510365545238751677692308677943427807426637133913499488233527734757673201849965347880843479632671824597968768822920700439 [email protected]:192.168.1.175;Kerberosv5;0x4c11231147c72b59000001f800001663;[email protected];LDAP.SERVER.COM;1024 35 131057002239213764263627099108547501925287731311742942286788930775556419648865483768960345576253082450228562208107642206135992876630494830143899597135936566841409094870100055573569425410665510365545238751677692308677943427807426637133913499488233527734757673201849965347880843479632671824597968768822920700439 [email protected]:192.168.1.170
  cn : Aaron Hoffman
  gidNumber : 20
  givenName : Aaron
  homeDirectory : 99
  loginShell : /bin/bash
  objectClass : inetOrgPersonposixAccountshadowAccountapple-userextensibleObjectorganizationalPersontopperson
  sn : Hoffman
  uid : aaronh
  uidNumber : 2643
  userPassword : ********
#-------------------------------

Answer 1

My language of choice would be Perl - but only because I've done similar operations using Perl and LDAP.

If I remember correctly, that ldapsearch command will give you the full LDIF entry for each uid in the testgroup cn. If that's the case, then you'll need to clean it up a bit before it's ready for the als part. Though it's definitely not the most elegant solution, a quick and dirty method is to use backticks and run the command's output through a grep. This will return a nice list of all the memberUids. From there it's just a simple foreach loop and you're done. Without any testing or knowing for sure what your LDAP output looks like, I'd go with something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

# should return a list of "memberUid: name" entries
@uids = `ldapsearch -x -b 'cn=testgroup,cn=groups,dc=ldap,dc=server,dc=com' | grep memberUid:`;

foreach (@uids) {
   $_ =~ s/memberUid: //;  # get rid of the "uid: " part, leaving just the name
   chomp $_;         # get rid of the pesky newline
   system "als -b \"dc=ldap,dc=server,dc=com\" -V uid=$_ >> vcardlist.vcf";
}

As I said, I haven't tested this, and I'm not exactly sure what the output of your ldapsearch looks like, so you may have to tweak it a bit to fit your exact needs. That should be enough to get you going though.

If anyone has a better idea I'd love to hear it too.