How to Remove (Delete) a User on CentOS 7

Preflight Check

• These instructions are intended specifically for removing a user on CentOS 7.
• I’ll be working from a Liquid Web Core Managed CentOS 7 server, and I’ll be logged in as root.

It’s just one simple command to delete a user. In this case, we’re removing a user called mynewuser:

userdel mynewuser

If you want to remove all the files for the user, then use -r:

userdel -r mynewuser

For a refresher on editing files with vim see: New User Tutorial: Overview of the Vim Text Editor

visudo

Find the following code:

## Allow root to run any commands anywhere
root ALL=(ALL) ALL
mynewuser ALL=(ALL) ALL

In this case, we’re removing root privileges from the user mynewuser . Remove the following:

mynewuser ALL=(ALL) ALL

Then exit vim by saving the file with the command with :wq .