So, last time I had found the moira interactive prompt utility which had a habit of just ultra-dumping my moira-list membership list along with a ton of control characters and excess prompt word schmoo. This is undesirable because any attempt to make a find-and-replace style moira list utility would require major cleanup of the logged output from the interactive prompt. However, since anything worth over-doing was once worth just plain doing, I knew there had to be a more naked utility hiding under the overall moira prompt.

Queue the MIT SIPB site, particularly its page on moira (*doh!*) Scroll to the bottom, you find “Making Moira Queries Directly,” and the acronym GLOM, get_lists_of_member. Perform a query (qy), of type glom (glom) to recursively find all memberships of a user (ruser) with the username (NAME) is the magic (mostly) answer!

qy glom ruser NAME

I say mostly because in this raw form it also releases a bunch of other information, but at least in an entirely repeatable (read, removable) fashion. However, more digging on the SIPB site shows that qy _help glom can give us more info on the glom-type query, its data-fields (importantly, list_name), and how to tell qy we only want the list_name field.

Appending -f list_name is the ticket, (again, mostly) to filter out the other data we don’t want. There is still “list_name:” prepended to everything, but at least a convenient colon is there to delimit.

Apparently, (typing as I’m working on this), -s is the final key! Add that and each list name is set nicely on its own line, without any fluff. Perfect!

For the next trick, a forum post tipped my off that awk is a useful utility for iterating through newline-delimited input. Typically, awk '/searchstring/ {print $0;}' inputfile is a silly way to grep-style search through inputfile and print any lines matching the regex searchstring. $0 is the “field” of the input line that matched searchstring for which you can craft the delimiters for. Luckily, I’ve already cleaned up the input so each line is a single string that is the only thing of interest, so everything here on out will use $0.

awk is also designed to use input files, and must be given “-” as the input file to be told to use stdin (e.g. to use piped input). so CMD | awk '/foo/ {print $0;}' - gets use well on our way.

Printing is very useful for debugging, but we want to actually do things at this point. The command sent to awk in the curly braces isn’t automatically a shell command; awk is an interpreter and has its own command set. Luckily it is easy to just pipe a print command through to shell: CMD | awk '/foo/ {print $0 | "/bin/sh"}' - will run whatever the matching lines are (which probably won’t be very useful).

Padding the print statement with some actual commands is the final step:
qy glom user NAME -f list_name -s | awk '{print "blanche "$0" -a LISTNAME" | "/bin/sh"}' -
This pipes the list of base moira lists of which NAME is a member, omits the optional filter in awk (processes all input), pipes the blanche command to a shell with the current line’s list as the first arg, then the -a option with LISTNAME as the moira member to add to the list.

Essentially, run this replacing NAME for your kerberos, and replacing LISTNAME for a moira list or member, to add LISTNAME to all lists you have permissions to modify and NAME is a member of. Obviously, you may not have permissions for every list you are a member of, but awk with print these errors and failover to the next line. Neat!