Hello all,

I have gone through the search and looked at posting about idle users and killing processes. Here is my question I would like to kill an idle user ( which I can do) but how can I asure that all of his process is also killed whit out tracing his inital start PID. I have tried this on a solaris 8 system but, I seem to make the child process a zombie or hang because of what he was doing. Is there a clean way to do this?
Thanks

To kill absolutely every process owned by a non-root user, su to that user and then use:
kill -9 -1

Thanks Perderabo,

What you suggested works great. But I did not fully explain myself. I have a guest account in which guest can use to log on to the server. But some guest do not log off thus the problem. I just want to kill only the select login in.

Here is a print out of who -uH

NAME LINE TIME IDLE PID COMMENTS
guest pts/5 Jan 9 08:11 2:48 10842 (cic2)
guest pts/6 Jan 9 10:44 0:02 11159 (cic4)
guest pts/7 Jan 9 08:56 0:35 11039 (cic65)

As per you suggestion I would use kill -9 -1 10842

But this will kill all users that are login. But I don't want to kill all login. Just guest at pts/5 from machine "cic2". I have looked at the man pages for kill but it does seem to talk about the addtional "-1" after kill -9. Thanks again

I never said anything about "kill -9 -1 10842". The command is:
kill -9 -1
press the enter key after the -1. Do not append other integers to this command.

The -1 is pid. Look at the man pages again. I sure have in my man pages.

Since you want to kill only some of a user's processes, you will need to track them down. Maybe a command like "ps -ft pts/5" will help.

I have used the following shell script to kill all child PID's for a given PID.

#!/bin/ksh
# This script will kill all the child process id for a  given pid
#Store the current Process ID
CURPID=$$

# This is process id, parameter passed by user
ppid=$1

if [ -z $ppid ] ; then
   echo No PID given.
   exit;
fi

arraycounter=1
while true
do
        FORLOOP=FALSE
        # Get all the child process id
        for i in `ps -ef| awk '$3 == '$ppid' { print $2 }'`
        do
                if [ $i -ne $CURPID ] ; then
                        procid[$arraycounter]=$i
                        arraycounter=`expr $arraycounter + 1`
                        ppid=$i
                        FORLOOP=TRUE
                fi
        done
        if [ "$FORLOOP" = "FALSE" ] ; then
           arraycounter=`expr $arraycounter - 1`
           ## We want to kill child process id first and then parent id's
           while [ $arraycounter -ne 0 ]
           do
             kill -9 "${procid[$arraycounter]}" >/dev/null
             arraycounter=`expr $arraycounter - 1`
           done
         exit
        fi
done
## Kill Parent ID
kill -9 $CURPID