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Sometimes when there are too many users logged in it can cause my computer to become very slow and laggy due to low amount of available RAM. I would like to be able to quickly log out the other users from the command line instead of manually switching into each user and logging them out.
Is this possible?
this is one answer
who -u
that give you the PID
Then you can kill the user session.
kill "pid"
ps auxf then you notice (left-most column has effective username) that this method doesn't kill all the processes which are executed by the current user (so probably you aren't logged out). The method of @precise seems to attend to this problem, though I don't feel comfortable with sending SIGKILL.
shutdown so it can give warning (allowing work to be saved) before forcibly logging out. That would optionally just switch to the login as if changing sessions, leaving the user session running in the background.
You may use who to check which users are logged in:
who
You can log-out the user by sending the KILL signal to the user-process with:
sudo pkill -KILL -u <username>
(which is same as sudo pkill -9 -u <username>)
example:
sudo pkill -9 -u guest-2Rw4Lq
(to kill a guest session user named guest-2Rw4Lq)
Note (kudos to pbhj): If you get locked in a console, use Ctrl+Alt+F7 to get back to the GUI.
kill "pid" left a ton of processes by the user still running, where this killed them all.
Aug 30, 2015 at 18:42
sudo pkill -KILL -u <username> for me switched me to the first console session; I thought it killed my current session but ctrl+alt+F7 brought me back to the current graphical session.
who -u
> adam ttys000 Aug 4 09:22 . 91228
then
sudo kill 'PID number'
sudo kill 91228
PID (process ID) is the four or five digit number at the end of the user readout (91228)
