I wanted to delete user alan and add him again.

This was because I had messed up some of the settings on user alan and thought it easier to start again.

I wanted to then re-create alan because, it being my name I have a sentimental attachment to that login.

I was aware that /home/alan would not be deleted so I moved it elsewhere.

The only problem I then noticed on my new user alan ws that starting kde gave an error

/tmp/mcop-alan Permission denied.

It seems that the old /tmp/mcop-alan remained with the old owner number of 1004

I sorted this out by changing the permissions.

--------------------------------

My questions are:

What is /tmp/mcop-alan?
Since it is in /tmp would it be safe to just delete it?
Is the failure of the system to delete it when alan was removed a bug?
There is another file tmp/orbit-alan with the old ownership. Does this need to be dealt with?
Are there any other issues of recreating the user that I need to be aware of.

Thanks

Alan

You can safely remove /tmp/mcop-alan and /tmp/orbit-alan. A few other temporary directories that might be in /tmp that you might want to remove are /tmp/kde-alan and /tmp/ksocket-alan but I think that if kde can't write to those it appends some sort of random string. From looking inside my equivalent to the mcop-alan directory it looks like it's used by arts.

The problem you've encountered is probably due to the user alan being recreated with a different UID than before. This is an issue you should be aware of since there might be other files elsewhere that have the old UID. One way to get around this would be to specify the UID when you recreate the user alan. Another way might be to find out what the old UID was from something like /tmp/mcop-alan and then trying something like:

$ find -user OLD_UID -ls

If you decide that you want to change the files found to the new UID then you could try as root:

# find -user OLD_UID -exec chown alan.alan {} \;

I decided to mount tmpfs on /tmp on my system so I wouldn't have to deal with temporary files being left there.

This is an issue you should be aware of since there might be other files elsewhere that have the old UID. One way to get around this would be to specify the UID when you recreate the user alan.

Since I wanted a fresh start I did not want to specify the old UID. I was worried that would take me back to the beginning again.

I think that I will gather up the old files, back them up and delete them.