how to kill the tty in unix - linux

Question

This is the result of the finger command (Today(Monday) when I (Vidya) logged in)
sekic1083 [6:14am] [/home/vidya] -> finger
Name Tty Idle Login Time Where
Felix pts/0 - Thu 10:06 sekic2594.rnd.ki.sw.
john pts/1 2d Fri 15:43
john *pts/2 2d Fri 15:43
john *pts/3 4 Fri 15:44
john *pts/7 - Thu 16:25
Vidya pts/0 - Mon 06:14
Vidya *pts/5 - Mon 06:14
Vidya *pts/6 - Tue 10:13
Vidya *pts/9 - Wed 05:39
Vidya *pts/10 - Wed 10:23
Under column the Tty pts/0 and pts/5 are the current active terminals.
Apart from those two pts/6, pts/9 and pts/10 are also present and I had logged into these last week. But the idle time for them is showing as "-" (not idle).
How can I kill these 6,9 and 10 terminals?

Answer 1

You can run:
ps -ft pts/6 -t pts/9 -t pts/10
This would produce an output similar to:
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD
Vidya 772 2701 0 15:26 pts/6 00:00:00 bash
Vidya 773 2701 0 16:26 pts/9 00:00:00 bash
Vidya 774 2701 0 17:26 pts/10 00:00:00 bash
Grab the PID from the result.
Use the PIDs to kill the processes:
kill <PID1> <PID2> <PID3> ...
For the above example:
kill 772 773 774
If the process doesn't gracefully terminate, just as a last option you can forcefully kill by sending a SIGKILL
kill -9 <PID>

Answer 2

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 3

for example kill pts/0
pkill -9 -t pts/0

Answer 4

Try this:
skill -KILL -v pts/6
skill -KILL -v pts/9
skill -KILL -v pts/10

Answer 5

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 6

you do not need to know pts number, just type:
ps all | grep bash
then:
kill pid1 pid2 pid3 ...

Answer 7

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 8

You can use killall command as well .
-o, --older-than
Match only processes that are older (started before) the time specified. The time is specified as a float then a unit. The units are s,m,h,d,w,M,y for seconds, minutes, hours, days,
-e, --exact
Require an exact match for very long names.
-r, --regexp
Interpret process name pattern as an extended regular expression.
This worked like a charm.

Answer 9

If you want to close tty for specific user with all the process, above command is the easiest. You can use:
killall -u user_name

Answer 10

In addition to AIXroot's answer, there is also a logout function that can be used to write a utmp logout record. So if you don't have any processes for user xxxx, but userdel says "userdel: account xxxx is currently in use", you can add a logout record manually. Create a file logout.c like this:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <utmp.h>
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
if (argc == 2) {
return logout(argv[1]);
}
else {
fprintf(stderr, "Usage: logout device\n");
return 1;
}
}
Compile it:
gcc -lutil -o logout logout.c
And then run it for whatever it says in the output of finger's "On since" line(s) as a parameter:
# finger xxxx
Login: xxxx Name:
Directory: /home/xxxx Shell: /bin/bash
On since Sun Feb 26 11:06 (GMT) on 127.0.0.1:6 (messages off) from 127.0.0.1
On since Fri Feb 24 16:53 (GMT) on pts/6, idle 3 days 17:16, from 127.0.0.1
Last login Mon Feb 10 14:45 (GMT) on pts/11 from somehost.example.com
Mail last read Sun Feb 27 08:44 2014 (GMT)
No Plan.
# userdel xxxx
userdel: account `xxxx' is currently in use.
# ./logout 127.0.0.1:6
# ./logout pts/6
# userdel xxxx
no crontab for xxxx