deleting a deleted user account

[karavite]

Hoping to convince my wife that five straight days of sitting in front of my Mac with OS X 10.1 was a worthy activity, I set her up with a user account, then realizing the hopelessness of using this act toward reestablishing our marital bliss, I deleted it (I even used the little Rose icon for her account, but she was only slightly impressed with my thoughtfulness). I should have known when she wasn't terribly thrilled when I set up my G4 as her document server to her iMac in our newly networked home....

Any way, now under the user directory I have the account with the word "Deleted" listed after it and although I am the administrator, it will not let me delete this directory from the finder. Before I go playing around with the terminal (I have some experience with this), I thought someone could help me understand why this directory is here and/or the best way to handle this.

[Abakadoosh]

well, its there for a couple reasons (i think anyway). 1, so that if you "accidently" deleted it, you can retrieve files that you want. 2, so that if an administrator deleted it when they werent suppose to, then the owner of the machine (or whoever set the root password) can then finnaly DELETE the account fully.

so, in order to get rid of the folder, you need to log into root (or you can do it by the terminal, but you said you didnt want to mess with that) and then go to the users folder and delete the folder. Root can do anything he pleases with any file, but an administrator cant screw with just everything. this is why the terminal/console is a very vital part to configuration, because all you have to do is type su or sudo, then your password, and you can interact with the system that way. btw, if you want to remove it by the terminal with just one command, type this

sudo rmdir /Users/*

* - the name of the folder you want deleted

if the folder has spaces or special characters, then put a \ before a space or special character, otherwise they will be interprited differently. hope this helps. any problems, just pm me and ill provide further details.

[karavite]

Thanks to both of you. Abakadoosh, your explanation of why this directory was there makes sense to me now. testuser, your command worked perfectly.

Can I ask one more question?

Last year I installed Suse Linux for PPC on this machine (it's off now - a triple boot system seems a little over my head for now) and I purchased a few books on Linux - will most Linux commands apply to Unix/OS X? Can you recommend a good book that would allow me to learn commands applicable to OS X. Currently I have the O'Reilly books "Linux in a Nutshell" and "Running Linux," but I don't mind buying more!