I was trying to delete some accounts from our CPanel servers this morning. However, I get this error when I try to remove an account:

userdel: unable to lock password file

The username does not show up in the WHM, but if you SSH into the server, the user still exists. What would cause the above error? How do you go about fixing it?

Thanks

Don't know CPanel, but it sounds like it successfully removed the user from its data, but was unable to access the passwd file.

You could just edit the passwd file and remove the user's line from it, then make sure their home directory is gone.

You probably got the problem because CPanel didn't have access to lock/edit the passwd file. Is CPanel set to run as root?

Never used CPanel, so don't know how to fix it, but that's how you could do it manually.

Thanks for the reply. The problem seemed to have fixed itself. I'm not sure what caused it, but it does not seem to be a problem now.