Yet another newbie question that suggests people love to kill and show their power to rest of the world…

There is a package called procps. It includes various useful (READ: nifty) utilities. One of such utility is skill which is responsible to send a signal to users and process such as:

• Halt user terminal
• Kill user and logout

Also note that these are utilities to browse the /proc filesystem, which is not a real file system but a way for the kernel to provide information about the status of entries in its process table.

Task: How to halt/stop user called didi
Type the skill command as follows:
# skill -STOP -u didi

You muse be root to stop other users.
Task: How to resume already halted user called didi
Send CONT single to user didi, type the following command:
# skill -CONT -u didi

Task: How to kill and logout user called didi
You can send KILL single, type the following command:
# skill -KILL -u didi

Task: Kill and logout all users
The ultimate command to kill and logout all users, type the following command:
# skill -KILL -v /dev/pts/*

Please note that send users warning message or logout notice using wall command to avoid data loss.

Filed under: howto, linux