Comments on: Ubuntu: How to Remove a User Account

By: zaid

zaid — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:35:02 +0000

i delete the user but i need to back user can i????? its very imbortant

By: Sander

Sander — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 14:34:01 +0000

If you give an example like following, maybe people won’t accidentally delete their home folder

sudo userdel [username]
sudo rm -r /home/[username]/

By: Kevin Li

Kevin Li — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 20:29:00 +0000

I agree.

By: luke

luke — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 19:43:00 +0000

ironic.. i got tripped up by the auto closing of html tags :)

By: luke

luke — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 19:40:00 +0000

I hope the author correct his/her sample commands by HTML escaping the ” so string “” shows correctly on a web page. Otherwise this is really confusing and it already done some harms to people.

sudo userdel
sudo rm -r /home//

By: jetp

jetp — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 20:36:00 +0000

windows user – i’m sorry to hear about the problem you had. i would say the instructions here were unclear. additionally, this could be done through a gui, which is generally safer.
in generally, the command prompt in linux can be quite dangerous. very powerful, can be extremely efficient, but these ability come at that the cost of commands that can delete a lot of data without a confirmation. i remember once seeing a list of commands that you should never type at the terminal because they will actually delete the entire filesystem. some didn’t even look dangerous! but that is where some basic experience and also the general rule that if you don’t understand a command and you can’t verify what it will do, don’t run it.
again, sorry for the inconvenience, i hope it hasn’t turned you off from linux indefinitely (and hopefully for novice users, the GUI interfaces that make many operations less dangerous or build in confirmation dialogs will continue to improve.)

By: Nick

Nick — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 20:19:00 +0000

I too am a heavy windows user, and I would never go to a command prompt and type del C:documents and setting thinking it would prompt me for the user. Why would you think it would in Linux.

This is why I am learning Linux… To get into a community that thinks. Most window users think computers have little fairies doing the actions the user wants and not what they type.

By: Windows User

Windows User — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:16:00 +0000

Nice, I’ve just deleted my home folder with all the data from all the users.

I am trying to learn linux and that is why I hate linux.

“following command and hit Enter (change to the name of the user account that is to be removed):
sudo rm -r /home//”

change what with my user name? I thought that using “//” will ask me for my user folder or something like that.

It was nice to state that this tutorial is not for an absolute beginner.
I am searching for another tutorial to recover my files but there are a ton of unusefull discussions about how not to be dumb and delete by mistake or how to backup but no one tries to explain how to do it.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 22:31:00 +0000

deluser is more helpful -> it deleted the user and its user folder.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:31:00 +0000

ubuntu is very helpful linux operating system