How To Remove (Delete) a User on Fedora 23

Posted on January 25, 2016 by dpepper

Category: Tutorials | Tags: Fedora 23

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Users via Command Line 101: Basic User Interaction

I. How to Add a User and Grant Root Privileges on Fedora 23
II. How to Remove (Delete) a User on Fedora 23

Pre-Flight Check

These instructions are intended specifically for removing a user on Fedora 23. The process on most other Linux operating systems is identical.
For this tutorial, we’ll be using a Liquid Web Self Managed Fedora 23 server, logged in as root.

Step #1: Delete the User

In this case, we’re removing the user we added in How To Add a User and Grant Root Privileges on Fedora 23, newuser:

userdel newuser

If you want to remove the user and all of the user’s files as well, you can include the “-r” flag:

userdel -r newuser

Note: Before removing a user’s files, please be certain that they won’t be needed again, as the files will not be recoverable. If in doubt, first back up the files by moving them to another location or downloading them locally first.

Step 2: Remove the User’s Root Privileges

Run the command:

visudo

And find the following code:

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

In this case, we’re removing root privileges from the user “newuser”, so remove the following line:

newuser ALL=(ALL) ALL

In vim, you can press “a” to enter text insertion mode, and hit the escape key (Esc) on your keyboard to return to command mode. For a refresher on editing files with vim see: New User Tutorial: Overview of the Vim Text Editor.