Sends a
SIGKILL
signal to all processes owned by the user.
Removes the user from the system's local password file.
Removes the user's home directory (if it is owned by the user),
including handling of symbolic links in the path to the actual home
directory.
Removes the incoming mail and POP daemon mail files belonging to the
user from
/var/mail
Removes all files owned by the user from
/tmp , /var/tmp
and
/var/tmp/vi.recover
Removes the username from all groups to which it belongs in
/etc/group
(If a group becomes empty and the group name is the same as the username,
the group is removed; this complements
adduser(8)Ns's
per-user unique groups.)
Removes all message queues, shared memory segments and
semaphores owned by the user.
The
utility refuses to remove users whose UID is 0 (typically root), since
certain actions (namely, killing all the user's processes, and perhaps
removing the user's home directory) would cause damage to a running system.
If it is necessary to remove a user whose UID is 0, see
vipw(8)
for information on directly editing the password file.
If
was not invoked with the
-y
option, it will
show the selected user's password file entry and ask for confirmation
that the user be removed.
It will then ask for confirmation to delete
the user's home directory.
If the answer is in the affirmative, the home
directory and any files and subdirectories under it will be deleted only if
they are owned by the user.
See
pw(8)
for more details.
As
operates, it informs the user regarding the current activity.
If any
errors occur, they are posted to standard error and, if it is possible for
to continue, it will.
The options are as follows:
-f file
The
utility will get a list of users to be removed from
file
which will contain one user per line.
Anything following a hash mark
(`#'
)
including the hash mark itself, is considered a comment and will not
be processed.
If the file is owned by anyone other than a user with
UID 0, or is writable by anyone other than the owner,
will refuse to continue.
-y
Implicitly answer
``yes
''
to any and all prompts.
Currently, this includes
prompts on whether to remove the specified user and whether to remove
the home directory.
This option requires that either the
-f
option be used, or one or more user names be given as command line
arguments.
-v
Enable verbose mode.
Normally,
the output includes one line per removed user;
however,
with this option
will be much more chatty about the steps taken.
username
Identifies one or more users to be removed; if not present,
interactively asks for one or more users to be removed.
The
utility does not comprehensively search the file system for all files
owned by the removed user and remove them; to do so on a system
of any size is prohibitively slow and I/O intensive.
It is also unable to remove symbolic links that were created by the
user in
/tmp
or
/var/tmp
as symbolic links on
BSD 4.4
file systems do not contain information
as to who created them.
Also, there may be other files created in
/var/mail
other than
/var/mail/ username
and
/var/mail/.pop. username
that are not owned by the removed user but should be removed.
The
utility has no knowledge of YP/NIS, and it operates only on the
local password file.
