Ubuntu – groupdel: cannot remove the primary group of user ‘administrator’

groupsuser-managementusers

When I try to delete the group pro1 (groupdel pro1) it shows the error:

groupdel: cannot remove the primary group of user 'administrator'

And when I create new user from AD server, the user's default group is pro1.

How can I fix this problem? Thanks.

Best Answer

This is documented in the man page. From man groupdel:

You may not remove the primary group of any existing user. You must remove the user before you remove the group.

So you need to make the primary group of user administrator something other than pro1 and then you should be able to remove group pro1.

Example:

$ sudo groupdel foobar 
groupdel: cannot remove the primary group of user 'foobar'
$ sudo usermod -g foo foobar  ## Change the primary group of user "foobar" from "foobar" to "foo"
$ sudo groupdel foobar  ## Done

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to remove a user from a group

Portablejim's answer is accurate but dangerous -- if you typo something, your system may be unusable, especially if you alter the admin group improperly. If you must edit the groups file, use the vipw -g or vigr commands, which verify the syntax before saving. Even then, there are better ways.

From a commandline, the one you probably want to use is the following (as root):

deluser <username> <groupname>

This will remove the specified user from the specified group. You must relogin to see the effect. It will not delete the user, or the group, just the membership. There are also ways of doing it with the usermod command, but it's harder to use as you need to replace the entire list of groups for a user in order to remove a single group. The gpasswd command is also capable of doing this (as sagarchalise points out), but is mostly deprecated. As always, see the man pages for more details.

Ubuntu – Change user’s primary group – have new files made in that group

I am guessing the behavior you want is sudo usermod -g groupname myuser .

Note: that command changes the group ownership for all files in $HOME, but not outside home. You may wish to change them back chgrp -R myuser $HOME

You then need to log off and back on for the changes you want to take effect.

If you do not want to change your 'myuser' primary group, newgrp is the way to go.

sudo usermod -g admin bodhi

ssh localhost

touch file

newgrp bodhi
touch file2

ls -l file file2
-rw-r--r-- 1 bodhi admin 0 2012-03-26 19:28 file
-rw-r--r-- 1 bodhi bodhi 0 2012-03-26 19:29 file2

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to remove a user from a group

Ubuntu – Change user’s primary group – have new files made in that group

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