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I sshed into a Linux machine (bash shell) from a public Windows machine (in our lab) and forgot to log out. I'm now back at my seat in another room and I am too lazy to walk back and log out that session; I can ssh into the Linux machine from my current PC though. Can I force-logout the other session from a new SSH session?

When I ssh to the Linux box from my current PC and type users command, I can see that I'm still logged in there; my name is listed twice - one for the current session and another for the session from lab PC.

I don't have root privileges on the said machine, but I guess that shouldn't matter as I'm just trying to log out myself.

3 Answers 3

84

Run tty on your current session, to find out on which tty you are working, so you do not log yourself out from current session. Run w to show you current users and associated pseudo-terminals(tty). Assuming that you are logged twice and there are no other users on your ssh server, your previous ssh session will be on pts/0 and current on pts/1. To ditch the session on pts/0 simply kill processes that are associated to it with

pkill -9 -t pts/0 
5
  • For some reason, pkill -9 pts/tty-number didn't work for me; then I found the pid of the process using ps aux | grep amar and tried pkill -9 -P pid and it worked. Thanks!
    – Amarghosh
    Sep 27, 2010 at 5:24
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    pkill -9 -t pts/tty-number. -t is the switch to specify tty Sep 27, 2010 at 5:35
  • Ooops, somehow I missed that -t in your answer when I read it first.
    – Amarghosh
    Sep 27, 2010 at 6:37
  • +1, awesome fix. I just reset my router while I was SSHing to a machine on the same network, and then realized it left that session logged in... This worked perfectly. Jul 15, 2013 at 3:37
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    Found this question today (and it works great, so thanks!) but found the -9 sounded a bit harsh. A simple -HUP sufficed for me.
    – Matijs
    Mar 5, 2014 at 22:13
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Assuming you don't have any other processes you don't want to be 86'ed, you can just do:

$ ssh <systemname> pkill -u <yourlogin>

And the other session will go away.

-1

You can type:

~.

You won't see that you typed it but it will close the connection.

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