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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?

muru
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Isaiah
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3 Answers3

122

this is one answer 

who -u

that give you the PID

Then you can kill the user session.

kill "pid"
David Foerster
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hhlp
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    This works but it has some strange side effects. – Isaiah Nov 08 '10 at 23:16
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    @DoR ...which are..? – Oli Nov 08 '10 at 23:48
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    @Oli Such as GDM restarting, and trying to switch to a user that I killed not working. – Isaiah Nov 08 '10 at 23:56
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    @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
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    I'm surprised there isn't something like with 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. – pbhj Nov 25 '18 at 19:51
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    @pbhj about notifications, consider to see this answer https://askubuntu.com/a/967130/970554 – Manuel Jordan Apr 21 '22 at 20:36
51

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.

Lorenz Keel
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rusty
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    This worked best for me. Simply running kill "pid" left a ton of processes by the user still running, where this killed them all. – Matt Baer Aug 30 '15 at 18:42
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    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 08 '17 at 20:22
  • -1: This command somehow triggered a higher priority process that never died, I had to restart the machine to kick the user. – RSFalcon7 Nov 13 '19 at 14:57
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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)

adm
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