How to kill MY OWN idle ssh sessions

Question

I have a few idle ssh sessions that I want to kill. This remote server is used by many users, how do I identify the pids of the sessions that I own?

When I run who, I get a list of ssh sessions labeled by username.

$ who
                                                                                       
me      pts/0        2020-11-23 18:05 (tmux(id).%0)
me      pts/1        2020-11-06 13:28 (<ip 1>)
someone    pts/2        2020-11-09 09:36 (<ip 2>)
someone    pts/3        2020-11-26 20:26 (<ip 2>)
...

When I run pstree, the sessions are no longer labeled by username.

$ pstree -p | grep sshd 

|-sshd(930)-+-sshd(3518)---sshd(3536)---python(5736)-+-{python}(5744)
           |           |-sshd(4285)---sshd(4308)
           |           |-sshd(5428)---sshd(5450)
...

Answer 1

Unless you are the root user, you will not be able to do anything to anybody else's processes, so there's no danger in just signalling all sshd processes:

pkill sshd

If you want to explicitly limit this to your own processes:

pkill -U "$USER" sshd

or, if the USER variable isn't used in the shell that you are running, try "$LOGNAME" in place of "$USER", or

pkill -U "$(id -un)" sshd

See also the manual for the pkill command.

Use pgrep instead of pkill if you want to get a list of the process IDs of the matched processes. Use pkill or pgrep with -o to only signal or list the oldest process.

Answer 2

If you are root, don't run pkill sshd on a remote server, or you won't be able to reconnect: ssh: connect to host yourdomain.com port 22: Connection refused. Instead:

1. Run w. Find your idle command in the last column (labeled WHAT). Then look at the second column (labeled TTY) to find your idle session, ex: pts/0.

2. Run ps aux | grep pts/0. Find your idle command in the last column - its PID will be in the second column, ex: 12345. Also look for -bash and note its PID, ex: 12346.

3. Run kill 12345; kill 12346 with the PIDs from above.

4. Rerun w. pts/0 should no longer show.