Is it safe to delete certain files

[Gary Cooper_1]

I have a number of users on my system who have left the department and I now want to delete their user accounts. Obviously, there are files on the sysytem who are owned by these users.

The files that I am concerned about are of the form:

./var/mail/
./var/dt/appconfig/appmanager/
./var/dt/appconfig/appmanager//Desktop_Apps
./var/dt/appconfig/appmanager//Desktop_Tools
./var/dt/appconfig/appmanager//Digital_Media
./var/dt/appconfig/appmanager//Information
./var/dt/appconfig/appmanager//System_Admin
./var/dt/appconfig/appmanager/
./var/dt/appconfig/appmanager//Desktop_Apps
./var/dt/appconfig/appmanager//Desktop_Tools
./var/dt/appconfig/appmanager//Digital_Media
./var/dt/appconfig/appmanager//Information
./var/dt/appconfig/appmanager//System_Admin

Is it safe to delete these files? (Before or after deleting the user account, or doesn't it matter).

Is there any other stuff hidden away that I should remove/update? (I'm aware of auto_home).

Thanks,

Gary

[Mark Grant · Accepted solution]

You should be able to safely delete any file owned by the user on the system. Most people don't actually bother though.

[Jannik]

U could delete the above:
mail/ - is just that users mail
dt - is connected to the usages of desktop

[Pete Randall]

Gary,

Absolutely - go ahead and delete them (after the account, I think).


Pete

[Sanjay Kumar Suri]

Hello

var directory contains information such as logs and spooler files.

It is quite safe to remove them.

Regards.

sks

[Shahul]

Hi,

If you are sure about users and user directories are not needed anymore, you can go ahead with "userdel -r" command, which will cleanup user information and everything under home directory. Before you do this, you can do a find for those particular user's files under /var and remove it. Once you remove user, these files may not show owner properly.

Best of luck
Shahul

[Sunil Sharma_1]

Hi Gary,

yes you can go ahead...
no probs

Sunil

[Umapathy S]

Gary,
I am repeating what others said. It is safe to remove the files owned by a user. In /var usually the log files are kept.

HTH,
Umapathy

[Pete Randall]

Gary,

As a matter of fact, you can safely blow away the contents of /var/dt/appconfig/appmanager/* (I just did!). Each users config will get recreated when they log in.


Pete

[Elmar P. Kolkman]

If you remove the user before removing the files, you need to use the user-ID to find the files. There is no way the system can link the user-id back to the old username.

And like everyone else said, removing these files is no problem at all.
But removing all dirs under /var/dt/appconfig/appmanager/ is something I would be weary of: what happens with personal settings that are different from the default?

[Pete Randall]

Elmar,

Personal settings should be store in ~/.dt


Pete

[Gary Cooper_1]

Thanks for the rapid responses guys. It's much appreciated.

Sorry if I don't seem very gernerous with the points, but I guess you can work out my reasoning.

Keep up the good work.

Gary

[Elmar P. Kolkman]

Pete, you're right. Sorry if I made some people uncertain with my comment...

Just looked more closely and found that for every user for every DISPLAY the user has used there is a directory containing some symlinks. This takes a lot of inodes. In our case, for instance, with about 100 users and using DHCP it resulted in a really large number of dirs and thus even more symlinks...