Logout a user

[Jonathan Caplette]

Hi guys,

I wanna know how can I logout a user???

I'm logged on a workstation with root vi a rlogin. On that station there's a user who has stay connected and I need to log it out...

Thanks

[Sajid_1 · Accepted solution]

hello,

You can kill that session, if you have the rights to do that. Make sure you are not throwing out somebody who is working now:
# who
# whodo
# ps -aef | grep user_name

get the PID and process lists and issue kill command:
# man kill
# kill -15 (or, -13,5,9 etc)

[Chris Lonergan]

Find the login process via ps or whodo and kill it

Chris

[Kelli Ward]

Hi,
You can also find the PID (to kill) through who -u
Good luck,
Kel

[Jonathan Caplette]

Ok thanks all!!!

[Hai Nguyen_1]

Jonathan,

Please be sure that the user's session is idle. The following command will kill the user's connection which in turn, should terminate all processes spawn within the session.

# kill -9 `who -u | grep | awk '{print $(NF - 1)}'`

Hai

[Nick Wickens]

Always issue the kill command as a "kill -15" (Its actually the default for kill anyway so you can just kill).

Only use the kill -9 as a last resort as you could end up with zombie processes.

Also if the user is connected to a database such as Informix and I guess Oracle its good practice to drop the connection to the database first using the database engines commands. If you are using Informix then let me know on this link and i'll post up my kill script which checks for Informix database connections,logs the SQL, drops the connection and then kills any shell processes with a -15 then waits and if still active will then prompt for an ok to kill -9.

[Sushil Singh_1]

Hi there,
To kill the user, just find the user's process ID and then use the kill -9 or 15. You might know to use the 'who' commnad

who -u
kill -9 or kill -15

but what u might not know if that is u use
who -m
this would give u the PID for ur login. So kill every user except the one which come from who -m. I hope this helps

[Ian Cameron]

I had a user/workstation hung up completely with an application process that I could not kill. I could not reboot the machine because it is a license server for an application and 12 other users. I had nothing to lose at this point so after warning everybody, I rlogin'd and ran:

/sbin/init.d/dtlogin.rc stop

Then:

/sbin/init.d/dtlogin.rc start

I kept an eye on things afterwards and there were no problems. Maybe someone here in the forums knows a reason why this should not be done, all I know is that it worked.

[Wodisch_1]

Hi Jonathan,

I would go for the PID form "who -u" for that user's shell, and for sending SIGHUP (that's no 1), ie.e "kill -1", as that signal is used to tell a process that is has been logged off...

Just my $0.02,
Wodisch