removing/deleting a user

cuss · 02-27-2003, 10:37 AM

Hi,

Kind of an easy thing to do...but i can' delete this user!! i've tried:

[root@xxxx]# /usr/sbin/userdel 'user'
(tells me 'user' does not exist)

[root@xxxx /home]# rmdir 'user'
(directory not empty....but it is empty....ls -l shows nothing)

[root@xxxx /home]# rm -f 'user'
('user' is a directory)

How do I accomplish this easy task?
Thanks.

XavierP · 02-27-2003, 10:52 AM

You don't say what distro you use - if Mdk or RH, etc is there not an option in the Config menu - userdrake or somesuch. It seems like your system won't allow you to remove individual 'user' components, a userdrake or userdrake type program should allow clean removal.

Have you checked through your user docs?

cuss · 02-27-2003, 11:33 AM

I've checked what i have (limited docs) and looked online. It is a redhat 7.2 system.

Crashed_Again · 02-27-2003, 11:50 AM

Why do you have ' ' around the username? Have you tried:

userdel user

??? Also do:

rm -rf /home/user

or you can tell the userdel command to automatically remove the users home directory by doing:

userdel -r user

cuss · 02-27-2003, 01:05 PM

Thanks Crashed_Again!

I tried 2 of the 3 choices you suggested and i kept getting 'bash: command userdel not found'. But it's there so i'm not sure what's up. Anyways, 'rm -rf /home/user' deleted the user i needed to get rid of.

Thanks again.

Crashed_Again · 02-27-2003, 01:53 PM

userdel is probably not in your path. I guess you would have to do:

/usr/sbin/userdel -r user

Alright!

PTBmilo · 02-27-2003, 01:56 PM

Remove the user's entry in the /etc/passwd and /etc/group and they're gone!

edit: you'll still need to delete their /home/ dir.

Dark_Helmet · 02-27-2003, 02:27 PM

Just as a quick side note, ls -l will not show hidden files (i.e. files that start with a period). To show those hidden files/dirs us ls -al instead.