Can't populate variable from command in Bash

Question

I'm new to bash scripting, and I'm working on a script where the user enters a username and gets a list of the associated information from /etc/passwd. Unfortunately, I seem to be having trouble populating a variable from a command. The error message I'm getting suggests the if statement isn't being entered into, but I'm not sure why.

The script currently looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

#readifs

FILE=/etc/passwd

read -p "Enter a username > " user_name

file_info=$(grep "^$user_name:" $FILE)

if [ -n "$file_info" ]; then
     IFS=":" read user pw uid gid name home shell <<< "$file_info"
     echo "User = '$user'"
     echo "UID = '$UID'"
     echo "GID = '$GID'"
     echo "Full Name = '$name'"
     echo "Shell = '$shell'"
else
     echo "No such user '$user_name'" > &2
     exit 1
fi

When I run it, using a valid username, I get the following two lines:

readifs.sh: line 20: syntax error near unexpected token `&'
readifs.sh: line 20: `  echo "No such user '$user_name'" > &2'

I'm pretty sure I'm missing something obvious, or doing something bash doesn't allow but I'm too new to catch. Can anyone point out and correct the error in my script?

Answer 1

Thank you to Charles Duffy for all the great feedback on not just this script, but bash scripting and Stack Overflow in general.

I was able to fix the script as I wanted. I removed the ^ and : from the file_info line, which was stopping the grep command from finding the line I wanted. I also renamed $UID and $GID to use lower case letters, and removed the space in "> &2".

Thank you again for your assistance.