Using Send Unix in ARD to copy files from laptops to server--

Question

OK, you ARD "Send Unix" gurus, here's a question. I am still getting my feet wet in the Terminal and having lots of fun, no big mistakes yet..
I am looking for a solution to make a teacher's life easier. It's a writing class. Each day the students do a writing exercise with the MacBook or iBook carts, and the students seldom have the same computer twice. The laptops are bound to Active Directory, and a local user folder is created in /Users using our naming scheme lastname.firstname, and the teacher laptop has Apple Remote Desktop Admin.
Usually, students are supposed to save their documents to their own home folders on the server, but it's kind of wonky through the menus (until we get the Xserve up and running), so they usually save first to Desktop and then drag the files to their server home folder icon on the Dock. BUT, I'd like to set it up so the teacher can get copy of the Word document each day to read and archive. Setting up another share for the students to drag it to proved unreliable, e-mail is not an option (too much processing of individual files for the teacher), and the teachers can go into the home folders when absolutely necessary if one or a few kids forget, but not all of them each day.
Here's what I'd like to do-- create a script that the teacher could run in ARD to do the following to the group of MacBooks/iBooks:
copy contents of currently logged-in user's Desktop to /Volumes/mountednetworkdrive/sharename/classfolder/ AND rename the file if there is already one there with that name, do NOT overwrite.
The students are supposed to name their files last.first.doc, but they forget, and the test scripting I've tried overwrites Document1.doc with Document1.doc from another student. Since they put their names in the document itself, it's not a big deal to the teacher if they forget to name it correctly.
The major problems -- the variable for current user "~/" as in ls ~/Desktop/ doesn't seem to list the desktop contents of the current user on the remote machine, therefore I assume cp ~/ would also not work properly.
I have also be unable to find any documentation of any of the various copy commands that talks about renaming instead of overwriting (like web browsers do if you download the same file multiple times, for example, by appending a digit).
Options: Instead of renaming, copying the logged in user's whole Desktop directory (but not whole cached login) would eliminate the need to rename, but still not as handy as all the files in one directory. Eg. "cp /Users/(last.first)/Desktop /Volumes/mountednetworkdrive/sharename/classfolder/" but we'd need the folder name of the currently logged-in user to copy, too, (confusing I know) so that the teacher would then find in server/share/class/ a bunch of folders named last.first (the student names) with another folder called Desktop and their document inside. The rudimentary script I wrote above, even if it worked, would copy the whole cached home directory, which is too large with the Library, as well as the inevitable Photo Booth pictures.
Another option would be to copy the contents of the desktop to a new folder named after the logged in user (if that variable exists).
Arg. This was supposed to be simpler, but if there is any way to make this work, I'd appreciate any ideas.
Thanks

Answer 1

My usernames are shorter, so I never noticed that who only has 8 characters. Just to make it more interesting, the if command further down was goofed up by the forum. The ' -e "$DEST/$FILE" ' should have square brackets where the single quotes are in this sentence.
Fixing the truncating problem is interesting, especially with the forum goofing up my if statements. I guess I'll have to try single quotes and you'll have to change them with square brackets. It's important that the square brackets be a space away from what's inside them. Dump the cd line and replace it with:
USER=$(who | grep console | awk '{ print $1 }')
DIR=$(ls -1 | grep $USER)
if ' `echo $DIR | wc -w` -gt 1 '
then
echo "FAILURE!"
exit 1
else
cd /Users/$DIR/Desktop
fi
This code will bail out if it can't find a single user directory. I doubt it will work well if the short names have spaces either. Be careful of the back-ticks in the if statement! They are significant.
Roger