How can I remove a Linux user account from Linux system. As you know user management in Linux requires root privileges. While removing user his home directory can be remove or preserved. As same with mail box. User mailbox can be preserved.

List Existing Accounts

Before removing or deleting an user account checking the existing of account can be useful. We can check whether given account exist with different ways. In this example we will use chage command with -l list option for user ismail .

$ chage -l ismail 
chage: user 'ismail' does not exist in /etc/passwd

• chage will give information about specified user
• -l test will list users information
• As said before the user is removed so there is no information about the user.

Or we can print the /etc/passwd in a formatted manner which only list user account names by using cut command

$ cat /etc/passwd | cut -d ':' -f 1

Remove/Delete User Account with userdel Command

We can remove given user account with userdel command like below. In this example we will remove user account named ismail . As this is an administrative task we need root privileges which can be get with sudo command.

$ sudo userdel ismail

• userdel will remove specified test user account

Remove/Delete User Account and Home Directory

The default behavior of the userdel command is removing user account from user data which resides /etc/passwd . This will not delete the user account home directory. If we want to remove the user account home directory while removing account with userdel we should provide the -r option. In this example we will delete the user account test and its home directory.

$ sudo userdel -r test

Remove/Delete User Account with Home Directory and User Owned Files

In previous example we have deleted user account with its home directory. If we want to delete also user owned files and folders while remove user account we can use userdel command with -f option. In this example we will remove user account ali and its home folder and owned files and folders those resides other than his home directory.

$ sudo userdel -r -f ali

Remove/Delete User Account Line From passwd File

We have an other less structured option to remove a user account. We can remove the line which user is defined from file /etc/passwd . As this file contains user details this will remove  user account. We can also remove password hash from /etc/shadow .

 

How To Delete Remove User Accounts In Linux? Infografic