Mass Deletion of Users

[John_44]

Hello Everyone,

I have about 50 users I have to delete. Each entry in the passwd file is marked with "disabled". Is there an easy way to do this? Or do I have to do userdel -r for each entry?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

John

[Vincenzo Restuccia]

See for help http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0x867adfe5920fd5118fef0090279cd0f9,00.html

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi John:

You could easily build a temporary script to verify the list your going to delete. For example, if the fifth field (the identification one) of /etc/passwd contained "Disabled", then:

# awk -F: '$5~/Disabled/ {print "userdel -r " $1}' /etc/passwd > /tmp/deleteusers

would create the file of user delete statements for you to review, edit, and or process.

...JRF...

[Pedro Sousa]

Hi John!
try the following:
grep -i disable /etc/passwd|cut -d ":" -f1 > /tmp/disable_users| while read USER; do
userdel -r $USER; done < /tmp/disabe_users

good luck.