groupdel: command not found

The groupdel command will delete groups from the /etc/group file. It does not delete user accounts that are members of the group. Exercise caution when deleting groups as a mistake can cause users to not be able to access resources.

Syntax

The syntax of the groupdel command is:

# groupdel [options] {group names}

The groupdel command is generally used to delete a group from the system if it is not the primary group of any existing user. The following command line shows how to delete a group named geek from the system using the groupdel command:

# groupdel geek

Before doing this, it’s a good idea to identify all files that have their group ID set to the given group, so you can deal with them later:

# find / -group geek -print

because groupdel does not change the group ownership of any files. It simply removes the group name from the system’s records. If you list such files, you’ll see a numeric group ID in place of a group name.

If you encounter below error while running the groupdel command:

groupdel: command not found

you may try installing the passwd package as shown below as per your choice of distribution.