Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.cis.okstate.edu!newsfeed.ksu.ksu.edu!news.physics.uiowa.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!newsfeed.internetmci.com!newsxfer2.itd.umich.edu!uunet!inXS.uu.net!nntp.wwwi.com!rtd.com!dgy
From: dgy@rtd.com (Don Yuniskis)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Help deleting a user
Date: 24 Jun 1996 12:35:43 GMT
Organization: CICDO
Lines: 35
Message-ID: <4qm22v$35c@baygull.rtd.com>
References: <31c5fba8.407993@news.intergate.bc.ca> <4qd73s$id5@primus.ac.net> <4qdlcj$hp1@baygull.rtd.com> <31CDDFAB.780@netaxs.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: seagull.rtd.com
In article <31CDDFAB.780@netaxs.com>, Jed Clear <clear@netaxs.com> wrote:
>Don Yuniskis wrote:
>>
>> In article <4qd73s$id5@primus.ac.net>, Mike Shultz <shultz@mail.gld.com> wrote:
>> >jordon@intergate.bc.ca (Jordon Randall) wrote:
>> >
>> >>I know this is a dumb question, but how do you erase a user?
>> >
>> >man vipw
>> >rm -r /usr/home/????
>>
>> Actually,
>> find / -user joe -print
>> will let you see if there's anything else of his (joe's) lying around
>> on your system. And,
>> find / -user joe -depth -exec rm -df {} \;
>> will blindly erase everything of his. There are other variations
>> on this theme...
>
>Disable the user, do the find, then do the delete from /etc/passwd.
Again, *I* advocate *not* removing the UID from /etc/passwd (at least
not immediately). Rather, disable the login with a bogus password
and a "nonexistent" shell. This helps if you have to do a restore
later and are wondering just who all those files belonging to UID 123
happen to be! (assuming joe = 123) In general, it's just a nice
convenient record keeping mechanism -- in addition to your offline logs.
The UID space is pretty big so there's no reason you can't assign
new users *different* UIDs instead of recycling an old one...
>Also I think find has an option for "unkown" user.
"unknown" isn't necessarily "joe" :>
You also have to check mail aliases, etc. to be "thorough"...