up vote 43 down vote favorite
11

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?

share|improve this question
up vote 42 down vote accepted

this is one answer 

who -u

that give you the PID

Then you can kill the user session.

kill "pid"
share|improve this answer
    
This works but it has some strange side effects. – Alvin Row Nov 8 '10 at 23:16
    
@DoR ...which are..? – Oli♦ Nov 8 '10 at 23:48
3  
@Oli Such as GDM restarting, and trying to switch to a user that I killed not working. – Alvin Row Nov 8 '10 at 23:56
1  
@AlvinRow If you execute 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. – Dor Sep 29 '16 at 23:13
up vote 20 down vote

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)

share|improve this answer
    
This worked best for me. Simply running kill "pid" left a ton of processes by the user still running, where this killed them all. – thebaer Aug 30 '15 at 18:42
    
Why SIGKILL and not the default SIGTERM ? The SIGKILL isn't healthy.. – Dor Sep 29 '16 at 23:06
    
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. – pbhj Mar 8 '17 at 20:22
up vote 3 down vote 
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)

share|improve this answer
1  
Please post textual information as text and not as images. You can easily copy & paste terminal content. – David Foerster Feb 11 '16 at 9:12
1  
Your image shows no four digit number? – Dronz Apr 23 '17 at 18:57

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.