We needed to collect “Place” information per user from our LDAP server.
The problem was that the description of the “Place” came out strangely encoded whenever it contained one of the norwegian characters æ,ø or å.

The ldap command:

ldapsearch -x -H ldap://ourldapserver.uib.no x121Address=XXXXXX

where XXXXXX is the “place” code, gave a place description that looked like this:

description:: SW5zdGl0dXR0IGZvciBmaWxvc29maSBvZyBmw7hyc3Rlc2VtZXN0ZXJzdHVkaWVy

where the real name of “Place” was something like: “Institute of …. studies”

The solution was to use ldapsearch as follows:
ldapsearch -x -z 1 -t departmentNumber=XXXXXX ou

where XXXXXX is the University of Bergen “placecode” for a “Place”. For instance is 221000 the code for our IT department.
-z 1 reduces the list of hits to one (1), and ou specifies the “Place” description.

The list of users was already collected in a text file: people.txt on the form:

username1
username2
…

The bash script that solved the issue for us:

[bash]

#!/bin/bash
# People collected with:
# ls -al /www/folk/ |awk {‘print $9’}|grep -v unwanted_line|sort > people.txt

PEOPLE=`cat people.txt`

for USERNAME in $PEOPLE; do
PLACECODE=`ldapsearch -x -H ldap://ourldapserver.uib.no uid=$USERNAME | grep departmentNumber | awk {‘print $2’}`

if [ ! -z $PLACECODE ]; then

# Some times name of place is written to screen, other times to a file under /tmp
OUINFO=`ldapsearch -x -z 1 -t departmentNumber=$PLACECODE ou | grep ‘ou:’`

if [ `echo $OUINFO | grep ‘file:’ | wc -l` -eq 0 ];then
PLACE=`echo $OUINFO | sed -e s/”ou:\ “//g`
else
THEFILE=`echo $OUINFO | grep ‘file:’ | sed -e s/”.*file:\/\/”//g`
PLACE=`cat $THEFILE`

#echo “The file is: ” $THEFILE
#echo “and the place is: ” $PLACE

fi
fi
echo $USERNAME, $PLACE
done

[/bash]