Clearing a "dead" login session?

Hi all.

I just logged in via SSH to my Linux box (RedHat 7.3), but the SSH
session did not close down cleanly - the connection was unexpectedly
lost and the client gave up and bombed out.

Now, when I do "w" on the box, I see a "phantom" login from this
session, with a massive idle time. The worrying thing was that I was
logged in as root, so I now have a dead root login hanging around.

Is there any way I can clear this login without rebooting the box?

TIA

Tim wrote:

> Hi all.
>
> I just logged in via SSH to my Linux box (RedHat 7.3), but the SSH
> session did not close down cleanly - the connection was unexpectedly
> lost and the client gave up and bombed out.
>
> Now, when I do "w" on the box, I see a "phantom" login from this
> session, with a massive idle time. The worrying thing was that I was
> logged in as root, so I now have a dead root login hanging around.
>
> Is there any way I can clear this login without rebooting the box?
>
> TIA
Try using the 'top' command in a terminal console to find the process.
While in 'top', you can choose the 'k' option to kill a process...

Jerry Smiley wrote on 17.07.2004 15:53:

> Tim wrote:
>
[...]
>>Now, when I do "w" on the box, I see a "phantom" login from this
>>session, with a massive idle time. The worrying thing was that I was
>>logged in as root, so I now have a dead root login hanging around.
>>
>>Is there any way I can clear this login without rebooting the box?
>>
>>TIA
>
> Try using the 'top' command in a terminal console to find the process.
> While in 'top', you can choose the 'k' option to kill a process...

Otherwise do a "kill -9" on the first process for this login (shell).
Obviously you have to be root to do this

Walter

you might do a "ps -ef" and find that process id and then kill that.

raqueeb hassan
kinshasa, drc

On 18 Jul 2004 00:38:33 -0700, (E-Mail Removed) (Raqueeb Hassan)
wrote:

>you might do a "ps -ef" and find that process id and then kill that.

Thanks for the responses, folks!

ps -ef showed the pid for the bash shell, then a kill -9 killed that,
which did indeed clear the "phantom" login as well :-)

Cheers!