Posted: 10th May, 2013

If you have multiple accounts on your mac, you may sometimes wish to log out one or more of those accounts without actually having to sign in to them first via the fast user switching menu. There’s a couple of ways to do this. First, if the issue is just that you want to shutdown the computer, you can log out all users by entering an Admin user name and password when this dialogue automatically appears after hitting ‘Shutdown’ (it won’t appear if no other users are logged on):

However, there are times when you may just want a quick way to log out users without shutting down and without wasting time logging in to their accounts first. Be aware that in killing a user’s process without logging in to the account first, any data in that user’s account that is not already saved (or autosaved) will be lost. If you’re sure that’s not a problem, then follow this short procedure manually or use the AppleScript version that follows:

1. Open up Activity Monitor (/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app)

2. Use the drop down menu in the Task bar to change the menu to ‘Other User Processes’  (note: you can use ‘All Processes’ in the menu if you wish, but that is less safe as it makes it possible to accidentally click on your own user process in step 4 below!).

3. In the filter bar, type loginwindow.

4. From the list of users that show up, for each one that you wish to log out:

• click on its row in the Activity Monitor pane to highlight the process
• press the ‘Quit Process’ icon in the Task bar above
• from the resulting dialogue window, click ‘Force Quit’
• supply an Admin password if requested.

Repeat for any further accounts that you wish to quit. (Tip: If you want to kill the ‘Guest User Account’, you’ll need to switch back to ‘All Processes’ and kill the loginwindow assigned to the ‘root’ user).

And that’s it. Your unwanted users are now logged out!🙂

Update 30th April, 2016: If you get tired of doing this manually, you can log out all other real users at once with this AppleScript:

set thisUser to do shell script "whoami"
set usrList to paragraphs of (do shell script "ps caux -o args | grep loginwindow")

repeat with i from 1 to number of items in usrList
set this_item to item i of usrList
set thatUser to word 1 of this_item
if thisUser is not equal to thatUser then
set theProcessNum to word 2 of this_item
do shell script "kill -9 " & theProcessNum with administrator privileges
end if
end repeat