Terminate All or Specific Linux User Sessions with a Simple Shell Script

Terminate All User Sessions

This section provides a Bash script ( kill-user-sessions.sh) that enumerates every logged‑in user's TTY and terminates each session using pkill -9 -t <tty>. The script works by piping the output of w through awk to skip the header line and print the second column (the terminal name), then using tail -n +2 to ignore the first data line, finally looping over each TTY and sending a SIGKILL.

#!/bin/bash
usession=$(w | awk '{if (NR!=1) {print $2}}' | tail -n +2)
for i in $usession; do
  pkill -9 -t $i
done

After creating the script, make it executable with: chmod +x kill-user-sessions.sh The script relies on three standard utilities: w – lists logged‑in users and their terminals. awk – filters out the header line and extracts the terminal column. tail – skips the first data line to avoid the current shell.

Terminate a Specific User's Sessions

A second script ( kill-specific-user-sessions.sh) accepts a username as an argument and terminates only that user's sessions. It calls w $1 to list sessions for the supplied user, then follows the same processing pipeline as the all‑users script.

#!/bin/bash
usession=$(w $1 | awk '{if (NR!=1) {print $2}}' | tail -n +2)
for i in $usession; do
  pkill -9 -t $i
done

Run the script with the target username, for example: ./kill-specific-user-sessions.sh user01 Verify the termination by executing w again; the specified user's TTY entries should no longer appear.

Summary

The article demonstrates how to use a short Bash script to automatically locate and kill active user sessions on a Linux system, both globally and for an individual user, by leveraging standard command‑line tools and the pkill utility.