A departing employee's account bob must be deleted together with his home directory and mail spool. Which command does all of that in one step?
LPIC-1 Exam 102-500, objective 107. Administrative tasks easy
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How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.
The options
Correct userdel -r bob
Correct. -r (--remove) deletes the account's home directory and its contents plus the user's mail spool, in addition to removing the entries from /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow and the group files.
Not correct userdel -f bob
Wrong for this task. -f forces the removal through safety checks — it deletes the account even while the user is still logged in — but it never removes the home directory by itself. The sentence in userdel(8) about forcing removal of the home directory and mail spool describes how -f relaxes -r's ownership checks, so it applies only when -r is also given.
Not correct usermod -d /dev/null bob
Wrong. -d only rewrites the home-directory field in /etc/passwd. The account still exists and the old home directory is still on disk.
Not correct passwd -d bob
Wrong, and dangerous. -d deletes the password, leaving the password field empty. Depending on PAM configuration that can mean the account logs in with no password at all. Nothing is deleted.
Why
userdel removes the account records; only -r also removes /home/bob and /var/mail/bob. Files the user owns elsewhere on the filesystem are never touched, so after a userdel -r you are usually left with orphaned files owned by a now-unused numeric UID, which you can find with `find / -nouser`.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- LPI exam objective 107.1
- What it says
- Remove user accounts, including their home directories.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 107 and space the ones you get wrong.
More questions on this objective
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- A line in /etc/group reads `developers:x:1500:alice,bob`. What does the final field contain? machine-checked
- Select the THREE statements that correctly describe /etc/shadow on a typical Linux system. machine-checked