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After this here, I want to remove user secureuser whose home directory is encrypted, but password and passphrase are lost. Since the home directory was holding some 30 Gig of data, I want to be sure that the encrypted content will really be gone afterwards. Will a

deluser --remove-home secureuser

be ok in this situation or is there anything special to care for?

Background: I do not want to end up in a situation where I have the user removed and some zombie 30 Gig occupying the SSD which cannot be addressed any more...

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flaschbier
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  • "30 Gig occupying the SSD which cannot be addressed any more" you can always format it ;) – Rinzwind Oct 09 '15 at 10:11
  • Formatting the hard disk or at least the home partition would require 9 other user accounts to be restored from backup too. Not really the thing you want to spend your weekend with. On the other hand, without the 30 Gig freed, I would not be able to restore the secretuser account. Surely a good reason for a downvote ;) – flaschbier Oct 09 '15 at 11:57

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As there were no useful hints or caveats from the community, I just jumped into cold water and did a

sudo deluser --remove-home secureuser

Just in case anyone else might share my hesitation: It worked fine and released the 30 Gig from the file system. The deluser also removed the group secureuser and all the references in group assignments.

flaschbier
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