Delete users in bulk
 

Is there a way to remove users in bulk? Maybe by a range of user id numbers.

I help run a school server for our Linux class. I create temp accounts for tests and now I just want to delete them. I really should delete the old users too but the Professer likes to let them have access even after the class.

Maybe use some type of script to take input from you about who you want to useradd -m "username" into the system while taking that variable that was used for the input and redirecting it to another file >> users.txt That is to be read later when making a script to remove userdel -f < /location/users.txt

obviously ran as either sudo or root.

the quickest idea I can come up with...

Good idea i'm going to add a few accounts and try it.
Do you know if userdel -f xkcd* would work? Where xkcd* is a list of users whose username begins with xkcd.

I don't think you can use the wildcard like that. =(
But I am not a great scripter, where I would look is into into a loop function for userdel, that would just keep that script running till it reached the end of user.txt.

You could build the list from /etc/passwd
or from a directory service

nice! I need to play around with awk and sed more! thx for the info frndrfoe!

Buliding the list not be a problem. I can just take the passwd file import it into excel and erase the info i don't need and save it as text. But thanks I keep forgetting how powerful Unix is.