[Fedora] 'userdel' irony -- what do you say ?

[Sawrub]

On 06/01/2010 12:12 AM, Alan Evans wrote:
> On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 3:41 AM, Mihamina Rakotomandimby wrote:
>
>    
>> 1rst pass: The user has been deleted. No bug.
>> 2nd pass : There is no more user to delete. What to expect?
>>      
> But the operation wasn't atomic, since userdel was asked to delete the
> home directory on the 1st pass. It reported that it couldn't complete
> the operation because the user was logged in. However it carried on
> deleting the user and not deleting the home directory.
>
>    
>> Argument: user's HOME is not always under /home/. If there
>> is /home/test and /tmp/test and /var/lib/test, which one to delete
>> after the first pass?
>>      
> The user's home directory is wherever /etc/passwd says it is. If the
> user hadn't been deleted in the 1st pass then removing the home
> directory in the 2nd pass wouldn't have been a problem. Userdel should
> determine before it does anything whether it expects to complete the
> requested operation totally. If not then it shouldn't do anything.
>
> Failing that, it should at least provide a message during the first
> pass that suggests that it did delete the user but couldn't delete the
> home directory. That's not really what the first pass error suggested.
>
> -Alan
>    
@Alan : great and righly said....

-- 
Saurabh Sharma
Linux user number: 490644
http://sawrub-blog.blogspot.com/
Open your doors.......It's time to look beyond Windows