Hi everyone.

Say i so a W on my shell as root and this comes out.

USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
root pts/0 adsl-X.X.X 11:36 0.00s 0.02s 0.00s w
root pts/1 X.X.X.X Wed22 12:10m 6:58m 14.89s -bash
joe pts/2 X.X.X.X 11:02 6:57 0.38s 0.38s -bash
chris pts/4 X.X.X.X 11:25 7:29 0.15s 0.15s -bash

Say i need to logout both roots, i know one of them is me, but the other one although i know who it is, i want to logout both without stopping their services, so doing a pkill wouldnt work.

What is the correct command?

thanks for the help

"logout without stopping their services".

Unless they backgrounded and nohup'ed the services they started then their going to receive a SIGHUP when the parent dies.

What you CAN do is check to see if they have any processes running:
ps -ftpts/0
Shows you what the first root user's terminal is running.

ps -ftpts/1
Show you what the second root user's terminal is running.

ps -ftpts/2
Show you what joe's terminal is running.

ps -ftpts/4
Shows you what chris' terminal is running.

If the only thing you see is "-bash" then you know they're not running anything else and can safely kill the the user. By the way if you do "kill -1" on the bash pid of the user it will clean up properly. I do this kind of thing all the time.

If I see anyone logged in for an inordinate amount of time that does have services then I track them down and find out what they're doing.

Also you can set TMOUT in /etc/profile or /etc/bashrc to cause automatic close of idle sessions such as the above. TMOUT=3600 means to logout after 1 hour of inactivity. Here we do that for standard users and set it to 1800 (1/2 hour) for root.