Sometimes the Oracle DBA has to I delete a Unix user account under Linux operating systems including the home directory.

How do I expire, delete or remove a user’s access from my server?

Deleting user account in Linux is an administrative task to remove user login credentials from system configuration files such as /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow and files which are owned by that particular user from the Unix server.

These command must be run as root user on Linux.

# Just Lock the password
usermod -L myusername

# Just Expire the account
chage -E0 myusername

# Delete the account. userdel is a low level utility for removing users. On Debian, administrators should usually use deluser instead.

# Be careful, User deletion is irreversible!
userdel myusername

-- Use these 2 options to delete that user's home directory and the spool of mails
-r : Remove Unix user account including home directory and mail spool
-f : Delete Linuxuser account with force removal of files

The userdel command modifies the following system account files:
/etc/group, /etc/login.defs, /etc/shadow, /etc/subgid and /etc/subuid.

 

How to clean associated objects?

If you want to clean other objects like cron jobs, files, print jobs; you will have to do it manually like that.

How to clean cron table
crontab -r -u myusername

How to clean print jobs
lprm myusername

How to change the owner of files owned by myusername
find / -user myusername -exec chown newUserName:newGroupName {} \;

 

Author: Vincent Fenoll, Oracle DBA in Montreal