Log a User Out from Command Line

By  on  

Automation is a system administrator, support agent, and tech savvy person's dream. Automating tasks via scripts remotely helps to get clients out of trouble or even the organization itself. Oftentimes big updates can require users log out. Logging a user out from command line is super easy on Macs!

To log a user out of macOS with a confirmation warning, execute the following from command line:

osascript -e 'tell app "System Events" to log out'

To force log out of macOS without warning, execute the following from command line:

osascript -e 'tell application "loginwindow" to  «event aevtrlgo»'

osascript is a really amazing utility, one that lets you change system volume, send iMessages, and identify app IDs. Readable automation commands? Priceless!

Recent Features

  • By
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

  • By
    Serving Fonts from CDN

    For maximum performance, we all know we must put our assets on CDN (another domain).  Along with those assets are custom web fonts.  Unfortunately custom web fonts via CDN (or any cross-domain font request) don't work in Firefox or Internet Explorer (correctly so, by spec) though...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Implementing Basic and Fancy Show/Hide in MooTools 1.2

    One of the great parts of MooTools is that the library itself allows for maximum flexibility within its provided classes. You can see evidence of this in the "Class" class' implement method. Using the implement method, you can add your own methods to...

  • By
    spellcheck Attribute

    Many useful attributes have been provided to web developers recently:  download, placeholder, autofocus, and more.  One helpful older attribute is the spellcheck attribute which allows developers to  control an elements ability to be spell checked or subject to grammar checks.  Simple enough, right?

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!