Anono-monk,

What is your criteria for skipping an entry? You have root, and johnny marked as skip, but you didnt give a reason that it should be skipped.

Otherwise, here is a theoretical solution

---

First, open your /etc/passwd file, and read it to an array

  open (fd, '/etc/passwd') or die $!;
  my @CONTENTS = <fd>;
  close (fd);
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Now that that is done, get each entry except for root, and compare it to the NIS one

  sub ypMatchit
  {#This does the most work
    # I don't know if you want to add root and johnny
    # to your new file or not. If you do want them to
    # be added, then change the next trwo undef's you 
    # see to be '0';
    return undef if ($_ && 'root');
    return undef if ((<i>rules for skipping johnny are enforced</i>));
    my $Final = ypmatch($_);
    
    #add any other processing you want to do here
    return 0 if ($Final = (SUCCESS));
    return undef;
  }
  my @FINAL = ();
  foreach my $CurrentEntry ( @CONTENTS )
  {
    push @FINAL, $CurrentEntry if( defined(ypMatchit($CurrentEntry)));
  }
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Now write the final thing out to a file

  open (FD, '/etc/newPasswd') or die $!;
  foreach (@FINAL) { print FD $_; }
  close (FD);
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This is all theory by the way, but I think it is a good start (I did somthing similiar several months ago, and this methodology worked.

HTH - Kristofer