Killing user

[Ranjith_5]

Hi All,

My friend is not able to kill one user logged in to the system. Even after doing fuser -k /dev/pts/1 , it still shows the user as logged in

hummspd1#w
11:00am up 121 days, 41 mins, 4 users, load average: 0.20, 0.11, 0.10
User tty login@ idle JCPU PCPU what
kellym pts/tb 9:58am 3 -sh
frama pts/1 6:53pm 11:24 -


What could be the reason for this...

Regards,
Syam

[Chris Wilshaw]

It could be that one of the processes that is running is stuck waiting for I/O, in which case it would be unable to respond to the kill signal.

what other processes are associated to that terminal?

use ps -ft pts/1 to check.

[Ranjith_5]

ps -ef doesnt show anything as per my friend's feedback..may be a strange problem..

anyway I am not able to give a proper response as this is not my machine..

Regards,
Syam

[Zigor Buruaga]

Hi,

So if you run "who" or "whodo", you can see a user connected to that terminal and its PID, but if you run
"ps -ef | grep that_PID" nothing appears, is it right? ( probably I'm misunderstanding this ... ).
If that's the case, I think it could be due to a corrupted utmp file ( not sure ).

Regards,
Zigor

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

orphaned processes owned by the user.

Check the process id's with ps -ef.

If the PPID is 1, you'll have to boot to make this go away.

SEP

[Borislav Perkov]

Hi Syam,

try to locate the PID with

lsof | grep user_name

Regards,
Borislav

[Sandman!]

See what files are open and try killing its pid w/ lsof:

# lsof -uframa

enjoy!

[Ranjith_5]

Hi All,

Sorry to say that I was not able to get any more information on this..But thanks for all your help. The machine is at UK and my friend is at a different geographical location..I Hope the problem is not that serious since he didn't call me since yesterday evening.


Regards,
Syam

[Arunvijai_4]

Syam, It could be a hung process and waiting for something else.. Rebooting should help your friend.. Anyways, you are out of trouble ;)

-Arun

[Ranjith_5]

Hi All,

I understand that the patch level of that machine was very old and the problem can be resolved after installing the latest bundle.

The problem was resolved presently after editing a script which checks for any duplicate logins.

Thanks for all your helps.

Regards,
Syam