11.4. Removing a user
To remove a user, you first remove all
his files, mailboxes, mail aliases, print jobs,
cron and at jobs,
and all other references to the user. Then you remove the
relevant lines from /etc/passwd and
/etc/group (remember to remove the username
from all groups it's been added to). It may be a good idea to
first disable the account (see below), before you start removing
stuff, to prevent the user from using the account while it is
being removed.
Remember that users may have files outside their home
directory. The find command can find them:
However, note that the above command will take a
long time, if you have large disks. If you
mount network disks, you need to be careful so that you won't
trash the network or the server.
Some Linux distributions come with special
commands to do this; look for deluser or
userdel. However, it is easy to do it by
hand as well, and the commands might not do everything.
