How To Delete A User On Ubuntu
How do you delete a user from a machine using the Ubuntu operating system?
To do this, you can use the userdel
command native to Ubuntu. userdel
is a low level utility for removing users that modifies the system account files, deleting any entry that refers to a given user name.
To delete a user, use this command (replace username
with your user's name):
sudo userdel username
If the username
supplied doesn't exist, the command will fail.
Then, you may also want to delete the /home
directory associated with the deleted user account:
sudo rm -r /home/username
You can also achieve this by adding the -r
or --remove
flag to the userdel
command. This will remove the user's home directory along with the home directory itself.
The command with the --remove
flag attached would look like this:
sudo userdel --remove username
One caveat is that the userdel
command will not allow you to delete a user if there are running processes that belong to that user. The -f
or --force
option can force the deletion of this account.
The command would look like this:
sudo userdel --force username
After using the userdel
command, you should also manually go through your system files and verify that no files owned by the user remain.
Thanks for reading and happy coding!