Gracefully logging off another user.

[Chris Mohler]

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 2:10 PM, Colin Murphy <Colin at spudulike.me.uk> wrote:
> On my home, family machine, members of the household are quite happy
> to 'Switch User' and open up a session for themselves - they seem far less
> happy to log out again at the end of a session.  This usually means there are
> several, three, maybe four, active sessions running on the one machine.  If
> one of these sessions has some processor intensive task running, say they've
> left a browser on some flash rich page, system response times really plummet.
>
> Instruction and education to family members, some times with a larting stick,
> has not reaped the rewards one might have hoped for.  So ...
>
> What is the most graceful way, as a super user, to log out another user
> closing all of their processes and ending their session?

Hmm - not sure how graceful this is, but I usually do "sudo pkill -U
<username>".  I have not tried this recently (don't multi-seat that
often anymore) - it should not cause any great harm, but you might
want to test it out first.

Chris