how to kill the tty in unix

Question

This is the result of the finger command (Today(Monday) when I (Vidya) logged in)

sekic1083 [6:14am] [/home/vidya] -> finger
Name        Tty          


        

Answer 1

I had the same question as you but I wanted to kill the gnome terminal which I was in. I read the manual on "who" and found that you can list all of the sessions logged into your computer with the '-a' option and then the '-l' option prints the system login processes.

who -la

You should get something like this. Then all you have to do is kill the process with the 'kill' command.

kill <PID>

Answer 2

The simplest way is with the pkill command. In your case:

pkill -9 -t pts/6
pkill -9 -t pts/9
pkill -9 -t pts/10

Regarding tty sessions, the commands below are always useful:

w - shows active terminal sessions

tty - shows your current terminal session (so you won't close it by accident)

last | grep logged - shows currently logged users

Sometimes we want to close all sessions of an idle user (ie. when connections are lost abruptly).

pkill -u username - kills all sessions of 'username' user.

And sometimes when we want to kill all our own sessions except the current one, so I made a script for it. There are some cosmetics and some interactivity (to avoid accidental running on the script).

#!/bin/bash
MYUSER=`whoami`
MYSESSION=`tty | cut -d"/" -f3-`
OTHERSESSIONS=`w $MYUSER | grep "^$MYUSER" | grep -v "$MYSESSION" | cut -d" " -f2`
printf "\e[33mCurrent session\e[0m: $MYUSER[$MYSESSION]\n"

if [[ ! -z $OTHERSESSIONS ]]; then
  printf "\e[33mOther sessions:\e[0m\n"
  w $MYUSER | egrep "LOGIN@|^$MYUSER" | grep -v "$MYSESSION" | column -t
  echo ----------
  read -p "Do you want to force close all your other sessions? [Y]Yes/[N]No: " answer
  answer=`echo $answer | tr A-Z a-z`
  confirm=("y" "yes")

  if [[ "${confirm[@]}" =~ "$answer" ]]; then
  for SESSION in $OTHERSESSIONS
    do
         pkill -9 -t $SESSION
         echo Session $SESSION closed.
    done
  fi
else
        echo "There are no other sessions for the user '$MYUSER'".
fi

Answer 3

I had the same problem today. I had NO remaining processes, but the remaining finger entry of user "xxx", which prevent me the deletion of this user using "userdel xxx".

Error message was: userdel: account `xxx' is currently in use.

It looked like a crashed terminal session. So I rebooted, but the issue remained.

last xxx
xxx      pts/5        10.1.2.3     Fri Feb  7 10:25 - crash  (01:27)

So I (re)moved the /var/run/utmp file:

mv /var/run/utmp /var/run/utmp.save ; touch /var/run/utmp

This cleared all finger entries. Unfortunately in this way even the current running sessions will be cleared. If this is an issue for you, you have to reboot, after you (re)moved the utmp file.

However in my case this was the solution. Afterwards I was able to successfully delete the user, using "userdel xxx".

Answer 4

you do not need to know pts number, just type:

ps all | grep bash

then:

kill pid1 pid2 pid3 ...