The way I do is to have a trigger. Whenever a field changes, there is a trigger associated with that, this trigger populates the appropriate field for that user being modified. I update the field using trigger for both inserts & updates.

EX: in MYSQL this is the trigger for new user addition. I just add the email address and password to the db using 'INSERT INTO'..The home directory is updated by this trigger. ( I have a similar trigger for updates)

*************************** 1. row *************************** Trigger: TRIG_HOME_INS Event: INSERT Table: user Statement: BEGIN SET new.home=concat('/path/to/mdfiles/',substring_index(new.email,'@',-1),'/',substring_index(new.email,'@',1)); end Timing: BEFORE Created: NULL sql_mode: Definer: mailadmin@localhost character_set_client: utf8 collation_connection: utf8_general_ci Database Collation: latin1_swedish_ci

you could have a trigger that updates the appropriate field when the name changes etc...

-Vijay

On 30/09/14 7:59 PM, Ralf Hildebrandt wrote:

Currently I'm using user_query = SELECT 1000 AS uid, 1000 AS gid, '/srv/vmail/%2.256Hu/%Lu' AS home, ...

so I'm hashing based on %u (basically). But in my SQL db I have a "unique_identifier" field, which never changes, even when the user is changing his/her email address (due to marriage or the like).

What I'd really like to do is to use %u to find the value of the unique_identifier field, hash THAT value and use "AS home". But how?

That way I can rename users without shuffling directories around the filesystem.