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Deactivating a User

 

Sometimes you may just want to temporarily ``remove'' a user, with the intention of reinstating the user later. The Deactivate and Reactivate functions handle this. When you deactivate a user, the user's password is locked by prepending a ``*'' to it, preventing the user from logging in. You also have the option of ``collapsing'' the user's home directory with tar and gzip, which can save some space. When you reactivate a user, the password locking is removed, and if the home directory was collapsed, it is expanded back to normal.



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