RE: Hearing the truth??

hi, 

There are 2 scenarios to this statement. 
1. The user kept all of his files in his home directory. In which case
userdel -r will delete user directory and all the files in it. 

2. The users are allowed to have files all over the system in which case
a simple "find / -user username -print" would reveal all the files
associated with the particular user.  And you can do rm on those files
fairly easy.

I hope this helps, and I also hope I didn't misunderstand the issue. 
Good luck, unix admins might be hard to convince sometimes :)

-------------------------------------- 
OGAN SAYEK 
Systems Engineer 
Towson University 
Computing and Network Services (CANS) 
Email: [email protected] 
Phone: 410.704.4256 



-----Original Message-----
From: OBrien, Brennan [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2004 8:22 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Hearing the truth??

All:

I've got an interesting situation at the office I could use some advice
on.  I'm being asked from a security perspective whether the following
statement (made by our Unix admins) could be considered true:

"The only way you can delete a user account on a unix environment is to
write a series of scripts to eliminate file associations."

So, while I don't disagree with the logic, is this actually the case
that there are no commercial tools available to assist in this arena,
and the only method of deleting a user on a system safely and
effectively is to write a bunch of scripts on your own?  This just begs
to be a problem solved by a commercial entity if it's actually the case.


We're in a Sun environment. Some thoughts would be appreciated. 

Brennan