Re: deleting user account: disposition of user's files?

From: Chris Mattern (matternc_at_comcast.net)
Date: 10/27/04 

Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 15:43:38 -0400

sinister wrote:

> If I delete a user's account, either manually or with userdel, what
> happens
> to files the user owns? (I.e., the system will see them as being owned by
> someone who doesn't exist; is that a problem?)

The system will report them as being owned by uid "x", x being whatever
the user's uid was. Since you now no longer have a user with that uid,
they are effectively not owned by anybody. If another user is created
with that uid, they will then belong to *that* user. Whether or not
this is a problem will tend to depend on your circumstances. find
can actually search out files owned by nonexistant users (-nouser).
>
> Also, some info out there claims that if you don't change ownership, you
> could have a problem because if the userid is recycled, the new user will
> automatically inherit the files of the defunct user.

Yep. Not the userid, the uid--the number associated with the userid.
If that's recycled, all the old files will suddenly belong to the new
user.

> Somewhere else it
> sounded like some systems prevent this by preventing userids from being
> recycled.

Um, no. I don't know of any system that prevents recycling uids. I don't
even know how it would be done--once a userid is deleted, the system has
no way of knowing that that uid was once used.

> What's the convention with SunOs 5.9?

If you recycled a uid, files that belong to it will belong to the new
user. That's true of any UNIX system, anywhere.
>
> TIA,
>
> sjfromm 

-- 
             Christopher Mattern
"Which one you figure tracked us?"
"The ugly one, sir."
"...Could you be more specific?"

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