Unable to remove user: "user is currently logged in"

Question

When trying to remove the user, it returns "user is currently logged in".
I already killed the user using pkill -KILL -u usernameHere and several other commands, but it does not help.

How can I remove this user?

Running CentOS 6.

Solution 1

SU to the user su - username and run kill -9 -1 as the user.

Exit the shell and try the userdel -r username again.

Or you can check for processes from the user using lsof -u username and kill the relevant PIDs.

Or pkill -u username or pkill -u uid

Solution 2

Or ps aux | grep <username> and kill the processes the user is running.

Solution 3

If the above steps don't help! (Assuming you are using on the runlevel 5)

You could try the following:

1. Change the runlevel to 3 (init 3)
2. log-in with other than deleting account to delete (root/other account)
3. userdel -r username

Comments

[Vic]

This was the first thing I tried before Googling this. When I did it, I got nothing in the grep results.

[kasperd]

I don't see anything new in this answer. And the older answers have better explanations of what they are doing.

[Fred Flint]

Be careful! Using the first command above killed all my userpace daemons. Since it is a production server I had to restart them all manually. So it's kind of a dangerous command on a production server. In my case it was a node hosting dozens of VPS servers so it was a major thing for me.