We have some servers to manage. There are some user access to our server. We want to them log off or kill their processes by terminating. How can be achieve this?
List Logged On Users
We can logout other users forcibly like below. Keep in mind we need to be root to complete this command. First we will list currently logged in users with the who
command. We can use w
command alternatively to list users.
$ who

Logout From GUI or Desktop Environment
Different desktop environments provides GUI menus in order to logout from current session. In this example we will logout the user ismail
from and XFCE desktop environment session. From right corner by clicking the user name we will list some menu which provides actions like Lock Screen
, Suspend
, Shutdown
and Log Out
. We can use Log Out
button in order to logout from current user session.

logout Command
We can logout from current Linux user from terminal with the logout
command.
$ logout

Logout Current User
We will use pkill
command. This command will kill all processes owned by the given user with the -u
option. In this example we know that the user ismail
is logged in. We will log out the user ismail
. We will also provide the -KILL
option which will kill all processes related with the user ismail
. Keep in mind that this will suddenly stop all this user related processes. This
$ pkill -KILL -u test2
- User -u test2 is logout
- pkill is the command which will send signals to the provided user processes
- -KILL is the kill signal to the specified user processes.
How To Logout Logoff User Forcibly in Linux? Infografic
