Gracefully logging off another user.

[Aart Koelewijn]

On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:10:07 +0000, Colin Murphy 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?
> 
> --
> Colin at Spudulike.me.uk
> Gotta go, things to be, people to do, and stuff to, err, stuff.

Many possibilities have already been mentioned, but there might be one 
more, depending if they leave there session password protected or not.

The first session on a X machine is usually in terminal 7, the second in 
terminal 9, third in terminal 10 etc. Supposing you are in the first 
session yourself, you can switch to the next sessions with [CTRL][Alt]
[F9] etc ([F10],[F11]) and when you are in their X session you can log 
them out in the usual way.

Of course, you could also log out yourself when you are finished, your 
family members then don't have a change to switch user but will have to 
log in in the usual way, or you could leave your session password 
protected, which would make it very difficult to get into the machine in 
any way without switching it of.

Aart