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User 501 resists deletion
Authored by: kerbaugh on Jun 16, '03 09:07:24PM

Hi Zach,
   I thought about mentioning this in a number of places above but you signed your name, so I thought you wouldn't mind a comment that might be useful in general. Changing over files after deleting a user is still easy if you remember the UID (which can be obtained from any file owned by that user) and no user has that UID. With the following, you can change all files owned by that (former) user (say UID = 501) to be owned by username, and the user's group, :

sudo find / -user 501 -exec chown : {} \;

The idea is that find can search for a user's number even if there is no longer any such user. Thus name and number can be used together to advantage.
--
Gary



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User 501 resists deletion
Authored by: zacht on Jun 17, '03 08:56:28AM

Thanks. In fact, that's mentioned in the forum article that I included a link to, but it never hurts to have it mentioned again!

Actually, though, I've started to wonder why the computer resisted deleting that user. Was it some weird thing with that specific computer, or is there something special about user 501? The computer seems to be running fine without a user 501. The user certainly had a home directory, so that wasn't the problem. It even managed to make a disk image backup of the home directory and put it into the "Deleted Users" folder.

Unfortunately, we didn't look at the system log. Oh, well.

--Zach



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