NAME
deluser, delgroup - remove a user or group from the system

SYNOPSIS
deluser [options] [--remove-home] [--home DIR] [--remove-all-files] [--backup] [--backup-to] user

deluser --group [options] group
delgroup [options] [--only-if-empty] group

deluser [options] user group

COMMON OPTIONS
[--quiet] [--system] [--help] [--version] [--conf FILE]

DESCRIPTION
deluser and delgroup remove users and groups from the system according to command line options and configuration information in /etc/deluser.conf
and /etc/adduser.conf. They are friendlier front ends to the userdel and groupdel programs, removing the home directory as option or even all
files on the system owned by the user to be removed, running a custom script, and other features. deluser and delgroup can be run in one of three
modes:

Remove a normal user
If called with one non-option argument and without the --group option, deluser will remove a normal user.

By default, deluser will remove the user without removing the home directory, the mail spool or any other files on the system owned by the user.
Removing the home directory and mail spool can be achieved using the --remove-home option. If the --home option is given, deluser will only remove
the user if the directory given to the --home option matches the user's real home directory.

The --remove-all-files option removes all files on the system owned by the user. Note that if you activate both options --remove-home will have no
effect because all files including the home directory and mail spool are already covered by the --remove-all-files option.

If you want to backup all files before deleting them you can activate the --backup option which will create a file username.tar(.gz|.bz2) in the
directory specified by the --backup-to option (defaulting to the current working directory). Both the remove and backup options can also be acti-
vated for default in the configuration file /etc/deluser.conf. See deluser.conf(5) for details.

If the file /usr/local/sbin/deluser.local exists, it will be executed after the user account has been removed in order to do any local setup. The
arguments passed to deluser.local are:
username uid gid home-directory

Remove a group
If deluser is called with the --group option, or delgroup is called, a group will be removed.

Warning: If any users have the group to be removed as primary group the group cannot be removed.

If the option --only-if-empty is given, the group won't be removed if it has any members left.

Remove an user from a specific group
If called with two non-option arguments, deluser will remove an user from a specific group.

OPTIONS
--conf FILE
Use FILE instead of /etc/deluser.conf.

--group
Remove a group. This is the default action if the program is invoked as delgroup.

--help Display brief instructions.

--quiet
Suppress progress messages.
--system
Only delete if user/group is a system user/group. This avoids accidentally deleting non-system user/groups. Additionally, if the user does
not exist, no error value is returned. This option is mainly for use in Debian package maintainer scripts.

--version
Display version and copyright information.

FILES
/etc/deluser.conf