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I want to create a unique username based on the following
bash script. The variable "user" should change based on the following criteria below. How would you achieve this?

tput cup 18 18

echo "Creating a new user:"

tput cup 19 18

echo "===================="



# Setting cursor up and validating user.



tput cup 20 20;

echo -n "Please enter your first name: "



read first



echo $first



tput cup 21 20;

echo -n "Please enter your last name: "



read last



echo $last



user=$first$last

user=${first:0:1}${last:0:4}



echo $user

Example:
first=John
last=Doe

user becomes JDoe

but if a user with same firstname
first=Jane
last=Doe

It should be

user becomes JDoe1

and so on..

You'll want to:

1. create your desired username


2. test if it exists:


3. if it exists, increment the counter and append it to the user name: goto 2

Try like

$ TMP=${first:0:1}${last:0:4}

$ user="$TMP$(grep -Ec "^$TMP[0-9]*:" /etc/passwd | sed 's/^0$//')"

It creates a temp var with your original approach, and then greps (with thew -c count option) the password file for existing users with that temp name and maybe following digits, anchored at begin-of-line, delimited by the :. This eliminates false positives (e.g.JDoefoe). The piping through sed is necessary alas to eliminate the zero count for absolutly new user names.