How to kill a particular user terminal on Linux

Intro.

Sometimes, the application we launched from command promp failed to exit. What we require is terminating it without clicking the ‘X’ button in the top of the terminal window. In this case, we prefer the combination of w and pkill, read the flowing for details.

Display termial name

To kill the terminal process, we have to which terminal process we are going to kill! Apparently, w is a simple command that could tell us who is doing what on the current Linux. An example is showing below.

$ w
 14:14:26 up  5:28,  6 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05
USER     TTY      FROM             LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
abc      pts/1    172.16.1.137     09:42    3:34m  4:56   4:55  vim a.c
aban     pts/4    192.168.1.7      09:30   16:26   0.18s  0.18s -bash
aban     pts/5    192.168.1.7      09:31    1:47m  4.21s  4.13s nmon
cust     pts/6    172.16.0.133     12:48    1:22m  0.07s  0.07s -bash
aban     pts/9    192.168.1.7      13:59   11:38   0.20s  0.11s vim b.c
aban     pts/10   192.168.1.7      14:02    2.00s  0.05s  0.00s w

In the code above, we could easily find the TTY we intend to kill. For instance, pts/2 is the teriminal we want to kill. What we have to do next is :

pkill -kill -t pts/2

What did just happen after click enter key on our keyboard? Just execute w again, you will not miss the answer!

Have a try and if you have any question, do not hesitate to add post below.

Good luck !