How can I logout from the GUI using CLI?

Question

I chose an Openbox DE at the time of login and the system took ages to load the DE. So I switched to CLI (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and rebooted my system (but I wanted to logout from the GUI and not restart the whole system).

My question is, can I issue some command at CLI to log me out from the GUI so that I can select different DE. (I don't want to restart my system every-time DE hangs.)

---

$ DISPLAY=:0 gnome-session-quit --force

** (gnome-session-quit:3144): WARNING **: Failed to call logout: The name org.gnome.SessionManager was not provided by any .service files

Solution 1

To end all user processes and be sent back to the login screen, you can use:

kill -9 -1

Don't run it as root though, for reasons discussed here.

Solution 2

This can be done using the gnome-session-quit command. It needs the --force option to suppress the confirmation dialog that would appear without it.

Unlike applications run from an X terminal emulator, ending a session from a TTY requires you to append the DISPLAY variable to indicate which X display is running the session. Hence:

DISPLAY=:0 gnome-session-quit --force

assuming that you are running GNOME on :0, which is the case in normal situations.

• In Ubuntu 12.04LTS running GNOME, the command

  "DISPLAY=:0 gnome-session-quit --logout --no-prompt" 
  

  works. The "--force" argument doesn't exist in the current update level]

Solution 3

In modern systemd Linux distros, the answers are all a little too complicated. The solution is one tool: loginctl.

In a good shell you even have autocompletion, so make use of Tab to see the options and parameters and it is quite intuitive. The command to search for is kill-session.

If you tab, you'll notice each session has an ID, but in my case it also showed the username and TTY (that is the Ctrl+Alt+number you type) and the seat.

Here is how it looks to me, e.g.:

$ loginctl kill-session 10  
10  -- 1000 rugk seat0 tty2

You can tab through the sessions to find the correct one.

Otherwise, if that does not work you can find the session ID by running loginctl list-sessions or just loginctl. You get something like this:

$ loginctl list-sessions                            
SESSION  UID USER SEAT  TTY 
    10 1000 rugk seat0 tty2

I guess it's quite obvious the first column contains the session ID you need to pass to loginctl kill-session.

This works very well if the GUI hangs and you need to force-kill it, which seems to be your use case.

If you want that to be explained in a more elaborate way here is how you can kill your own session if the GUI is not responding or you cannot use your keyboard.

Solution 4

Please follow takkat's suggestion. The standard is Ctrl+Alt+Backspace.

You can also run:

$ sudo service lightdm restart

Solution 5

As an alternative, you can terminate user sessions using the following, works well to log out users except for the root user- when doing maintenance for example.

loginctl | egrep -v "root|SESSION|listed" | awk '{print $1}' | xargs loginctl terminate-session

View more solutions

Comments

[jokerdino]

Not the best way to logout. Check askubuntu.com/questions/69114/…

[Thibault]

Never seen this option before. I probably should start using this. I'm supposing that killall gnome-session is a forceful way to close it.

[Ankit]

thanks, I ran the command but i got some error. I have edited my post to include the error. Please share if I have done something wrong.

[Admin]

My bad, I did not notice you mentioned you are using openbox. Unfortunately, this command will only work with a standard Ubuntu installation (Unity/GNOME). As an alternative, you can completely shut down the GUI and thereby your session by running sudo service lightdm stop. edit: what desktop environment are you using? Openbox is just a window manager.

[Dolchio]

Doesn't work if your terminal isn't part of the same dbus session as the gnome-session. How do you get into another dbus session?

[acolyte]

That's a bit harsh, don't you think?

[Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com]

Works great, but why? In special, why does LightDM restart after you killed everything except for init?

[RichieHH]

Harsh? It's extremely silly.

[ManuelSchneid3r]

@CiroSantilli巴拿馬文件六四事件法轮功 Because it forcefully KILLS (9) EVERYTHING it is allowed to. Which means every process owned by you. Using SIGKILL to terminate apps is absolutely not recommendable! Use SIGTERM (15). Applications can react upon this signal and do cleanup.

[Dor]

Is this the command that gets executed when clicking "Log Out..." via the GUI ?

[gioele]

Using --logout --no-prompt or --force instead of just --logout is a better idea, otherwise a logout prompt will be shown.

[gerlos]

This is way the most useful answer, since loginctl workings are independent from the desktop environment, and allow you to terminate even other users sessions, asking sudo password if needed.

[Alex North-Keys]

DON'T DO THIS - unless you're sure you have NO other processes running under your user ID. This method will kill everything running as the executing user, including active cron jobs, remoted-in SSH connections, long-running background jobs, etc, etc. Very dangerous approach, even for non root. (and don't start with 9, start with SIGHUP, then SIGTERM, then SIGKILL)