[drupal-support] User authentication script...

[Leo Burd]

Hello everyone,

I'm new to PHP and Drupal and I wonder how hard it would be to write a 
script to authenticate a user using drupal's authentication mechanism.  
Ideally, I'd like to pass a user name and password to that script and 
receive a True/False depending on whether or not that user name/password 
matches the ones of a user registered in my site.  The script would be 
called from either the unix shell or from another application.

In addition to that, depending on the complexity, I also would like to 
have a script to check if a certain user belongs to a specified organic 
group (og).

Any hints on how to implement any of those scripts?  Are there examples 
of scripts like those that I could have a look at? 

Thanks in advance for your help,

Leo