Way to logout a user from the command line in OS X 10.9

Question

I want to logout my Mac OS X from the command line. My OS X version is 10.9. I tried command pkill -KILL -u uid, but this command didn't work out. Is there a command that can be used to log out a user from the system using command line only, not AppleScript?

Answer 1

sudo launchctl bootout gui/$(id -u <username>)
or
sudo launchctl bootout user/$(id -u <username>)

Replace username with the target user's user name or replace the whole subshell with the user's uid. This tells launchctl to teardown the users login session (gui specifically refers to the user's temporary login session, user specifies the users background processes).

You can log yourself out without the sudo to test this.

Note that this will ONLY work on macOS 10.11.x or newer (see launchctl help for more)

Answer 2

To log out purely from terminal (or a remote ssh session), just kill the loginwindow process:

sudo pkill loginwindow

You could get fancy and specify the user if multiple users have a loginwindow process, but this is an easy one shot, no prompt way to end a user's graphical session.

Answer 3

This has worked for me in the past:

Log out (with confirmation)

osascript -e 'tell app "System Events" to log out'

Log out directly (no confirmation)

osascript -e 'tell app "System Events" to  «event aevtrlgo»'

or

osascript -e 'tell application "loginwindow" to  «event aevtrlgo»'

This way any running application will get noticed and can terminate in a safe fashion.

Answer 4

A nice utility to add to your Terminal is the "logout" command, to be used like:

logout UserName

Here the how to:

1. Edit your .bash_profile

   nano ~/.bash_profile

2. Add this line:

   logout() {sudo launchctl bootout user/$(id -u "$1")}

3. Save the file pressing ctrl+x

4. Restart the terminal

You are ready to go ;)

Answer 5

If you have multiple users ....

Find the Process ID with:

ps aux|grep login

Then kill that process and you logged that session out. But there are a lot of procceses left.

Check with pstree so you know which process to terminate.

Answer 6

This does the trick for me.

sudo -s

To get some root privileges and the # prompt, then kill the processes.

killall -vu username -HUP

And if it´s not all gone. Nuke em! Obligatory warning - killing things as root has no undo and no "are you sure you want to interrupt this process without saving your files, including system critical databases that might render the machine unbootable on rare occasion." type warnings.

killall -vu username -9

Answer 7

An extreme way to kick the user session out is to force a restart:

sudo shutdown -r now

This works out well if you are trying to update the system.

Answer 8

It's just

launchctl reboot logout

(needs to be run under the logout-target user, so prefix with sudo -u …a_user…).

man launchctl:

… With the logout argument given, launchd will tear down the caller's GUI login session in a manner similar to a logout initiated from the Apple menu. The key difference is that a logout initiated through this subcommand will be much faster since it will not give apps a chance to display modal dialogs to block logout indefinitely; therefore there is data corruption risk to using this option. Only use it when you know you have no unsaved data in your running apps. …

Answer 9

This does the trick for me

sudo -su user

and for root

sudo -su root

Answer 10

if you're logged with ssh to a remote computer you can logout by simply typing 'exit':

[host:~user]$ exit