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Re: inverse of `adduser'?



In article <[🔎] cMyzQd3JC4@muskogee.elmail.co.uk> you wrote:

:         *       delete mail spool file (what if it's nonempty?)

Tell the person running the script it's non-empty, and ask if they want it
deleted, anyway.

:         *       delete home directory.  What do we do about saving
:                 files?

Sometimes we want it nuked, sometimes we want it saved.  How about a "do you
want me to remove the users home directory and all its contents?" query?

:         *       maybe clean up files owned by the user or their group
:                 under /tmp and /var/tmp?

I wouldn't bother.  Trimming the contents of tmp directories is a religious
issue.

:         *       what about files owned by this user in other
:                 directories?  (Shared projects, etc.)

We tend to leave them as-is, which I'm not sure is smart.  On the other hand,
a find from / is expensive on a system with lots of disk...

:         *       what if the user has processes running?  Or a print
:                 job queued?  Or mail queued?

Life is too short to worry about this.

:         *       there should be a man page ;-)

Of course!

: Maybe it should be possible to delete everything from the home
: directory except a .forward file.

Actually, in my shop we don't allow .forward files to remain for folks who 
have left.  We have a whacked up copy of 'vacation' that is designed to return
the entire message to the sender with a prepended explaination that the person
has left, and where to find them now.  By forcing the originator of the mail
to update their distribution lists and handle the message themselves, we've
discovered that we can get the mail traffic for someone to tail off and get
switched to the new address very quickly.  Subtle, but behavioural engineering
really works...  :-)

Bdale

ps:  I should probably explain that, by day, I'm the Technical Computing
     Manager for HP Colorado Springs, and my staff and I babysit several 
     hundred HP-UX and Sun systems, plus a like number of networked PC's.  
     I'll probably slip into the use of 'we' from time to time, this is the
     context in which 'we' applies, most of the time... :-)


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