Content-type: text/html Man page of userdel

userdel

Section: Maintenance Commands (8)
Index Return to Main Contents
 

NAME

userdel - Deletes a user login account from the system.  

SYNOPSIS

/usr/sbin/userdel [-r] [-t type] [-x extended_option] login  

FLAGS

Removes a user's home directory from the system. This directory must exist and must be owned by the user whose login account is being deleted. After successful execution of this command, the files and directories under the home directory are no longer accessible. Removes a local plus (+) or local minus (-) NIS user from the user database. The value of the type parameter can be + or -. The following extended_option attributes are available: Indicates whether or not the account is distributed. The value of the distributed=n attribute can be 0 or 1. If set to 0, the account is deleted from the local database. If set to 1, the account is deleted from the NIS master database on the running system. Indicates whether or not the account is local. The value of the local=n attribute can be 0 or 1. If set to 1, the account is deleted from the local database. If set to 0, the account information is deleted from the NIS master database. Specifies an existing login account on the system.  

DESCRIPTION

The userdel command deletes a user's login account from the system and makes the login-related changes in the appropriate system files determined by the current level of security. Additionally, the files and directories contained under the user's home directory can be removed from the system.

With the -x flag, the system administrator can specify whether the user login account to be deleted is local or whether it resides in the NIS master database. If the -x flag is not specified, the user login account is deleted from the appropriate database as specified by the system defaults.

The default behavior on the system for the userdel command is distributed=0 and local=1. With these values, the system deletes the group from the local database by default. Setting the distributed= and local= attributes to the same value (for example, distributed=0 and local=0) produces an error.

You must have superuser privilege to execute this command.  

EXAMPLES

The following example removes the local plus (+) user, newuser1: % userdel -t + newuser1

The following example removes the NIS user, newuser4, from the NIS master database: % userdel -x distributed=1 newuser4

The following example deletes the user, xyz, and removes the user's home directory: % userdel -r xyz  

EXIT VALUES

The userdel command exits with one of the following values: Success Invalid command syntax or insufficient privilege. A usage message for the userdel command or an error message is displayed. An invalid argument was provided to an option. The login account to be removed does not exist. The login to be removed is in use. Cannot update the group database, but the login is removed from the user database. Cannot remove or otherwise modify the home directory.  

FILES

The userdel command operates on files for the specific level of system security.  

RELATED INFORMATION

Commands:  groupadd(8), groupdel(8), groupmod(8), useradd(8), usermod(8)

Documents:  System Administration, Security delim off


 

Index

NAME
SYNOPSIS
FLAGS
DESCRIPTION
EXAMPLES
EXIT VALUES
FILES
RELATED INFORMATION

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 02:40:34 GMT, October 02, 2010