deleting user account
 

Please,

How to remove all files created by user except ~user

?

go to user's home directory

and execute.

I guess I should ask my question another way:

How to delete all those files created by user that are outside of ~user/

Try this

Find the UID of the user using
TO remove files
Cheers !!!

Hi,

If you want to delete all files from user X, but not those in user X's home directory (say /home/X) find is probably the tool to use.

find / -user X | grep -v "/home/X"
The above command will look for files belonging to user X (-user X), the grep -v part will exclude the home dir of X.
If this is to your liking add the following to actually remove the files that are found: | xargs rm

The complete command will look like this:

find / -user X | grep -v "/home/X" | xargs rm

Hope this helps.

@vinaytp: Your solution will remove all files from the specific user, including those in the homedir!!!

Thx druuna very much. I knew that find / -user X -exec rm{} \; would remove ALL files so I just didn't know how to exclude HOME.

But I have another question - How to remove such files (created by X ) but after removing user X and his or her HOME? Suppose I don't remember X ID

Hi,

The username is represented by -user <name>, the -id <id> for the numeric uid.

Once you remove a user (userdel), the system cannot show the name anymore (name<-> uid is done from the passwd file). Instead it will show the UID that a file has.

I.e: If the user is still present:

-rw-r--r-- 1 druuna internet 296 2009-10-27 15:12 load27078.sql

If druuna is deleted, the above line will show as (501 being druuna's UID):

-rw-r--r-- 1 501 users 296 2009-10-27 15:12 load27078.sql

If you delete one or more users and later find files like this:

-rw-r--r-- 1 501 users 296 2009-10-27 15:12 load1.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 502 users 296 2009-10-27 15:12 load2.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 503 users 296 2009-10-27 15:12 load3.sql

it is not possible to find out which file belonged to which user.......

Good practice would be to first remove the files a certain user created and then remove the user itself.

Hope this clears things up.

Hi,

Yes, druuna, you're right. Your explanation has really cleared things up. Thank you.