How to log out a fast switched user

Power Manager includes a trick that allows you to nicely log out a fast switched user.

With Power Manager installed, every user on your Mac has a pmassistant process running. To log out a specific user, send their pmassistant process a USR1 signal (SIGUSR1).

Applications > Utilities > Terminal

Listing pmassisants

To get a list of pmassisant processes running on your Mac, type the following into the Terminal:

ps auxc | grep pmassistant

The response will look something like the following:

mb         467   0.0  0.5   124968   5152   ??  S     1:08pm   0:00.28 pmassistant
gcm        164   0.0  0.4   246612   3992   ??  S     9:47am   0:00.29 pmassistant

Send a SIGUSR1 signal to the pmassistant process

To send a SIGUSR1 to a pmassistant, and thus log that user out, type the following into the Terminal:

sudo kill -USR1 467

The 467 must be replaced with the process id of the user’s pmassistant. Sending a SIGUSR1 to non-pmassistant processes will result in unpredictable behaviour.

After entering your password, to ensure only those with administrator rights can log out users, pmassistant will nicely log out the user.

Why is this an improvement?

Using pmassistant to log out a user is better than Mac OS X’s default behaviour when forcing fast switched users to log out.

Mac OS X and Darwin’s automatic shut down methods are brutal. They do not respect the Mac architecture. These methods come from a unix world and thus expect particularly resilient behaviour from running applications. Sadly this expectation does not bode well for many of today’s Mac applications.

Power Manager uses a friendly method of logging out users’ processes. It still ends with a guaranteed log out, but it gives running applications a chance to autosave changes and release resources or hardware appropriately.