Deleting a user account
If you no longer need a user account, it is good idea to delete that account.
Getting ready
You will need super user or root privileges to delete a group from the Ubuntu server.
How to do it...
Follow these steps to delete the user account:
Enter the following command to delete a user account:
$ sudo deluser --remove-home john
Enter your password to complete
addgroup
with root privileges:
How it works…
Here, we used the deluser
command with the option --remove-home
. This will delete the user account named john
and also remove the home
and mail spool
directories associated with john
. By default, the deluser
command will delete the user without deleting the home
directory.
It is a good idea to keep a backup of user files before removing the home
directory and any other files. This can be done with an additional flag along with the deluser
command:
$ deluser --backup --remove-home john
This will create a backup file with the name john.tar.gz
in the current working directory, and then the user account and the home
directory will removed.
There's more…
When called with the --group
option, the deluser
command will remove the group. Similarly, when called with two non-option arguments, the deluser
command will try to remove a user from a specific group:
$ deluser john guest # this will remove user john from group guest $ deluser --group guest # this will remove a group
If you want to disable the user account rather than delete it, you can do it with the following commands:
$ sudo usermod --expiredate 1 john # disable the user account john $ sudo usermod --expiredate "" john # re-enable user account john $ sudo usermod -e YYYY-MM-DD john # specify expiry date
See also
Refer to the manual page for
deluser
withman deluser