Hi Lauren-

I think you could very easily do this with a script using killall. It unceremoniously dumps an app - no chances for user interaction, just kills it. You could go about it one of two ways: very directed or buckshot. If there are specific applications that are causing the problem, I'd go with directed. If you're unsure of what you want to kill, you could go buckshot. Here's the gist of each way:

#!/bin/sh

## Get the current owner of console, which is the logged in user. Use cut to isolate the username only
user=ls -l /dev/console | cut -d " " -f 4

## kill all processes owned by the logged in user - careful though, this is likely complete overkill and may have unexpected results
killall -u $user *

### kill only the problem processes
## kill Safari
killall -u $user Safari

## kill any MS products
killall -u $user Microsoft*

## kill Firefox
killall -u $user firefox-bin

exit 0

j

---
Jared F. Nichols
Desktop Engineer, Infrastructure & Operations
Information Services Department
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
244 Wood Street
Lexington, Massachusetts 02420
781.981.5436

The following command has worked for me to force users to log off in the past:

killall loginwindow

Dave
--
David Lundgren
Sr. IT Systems Administrator

Brooks Institute - "Passion. Vision. Excellence."
27 East Cota Street
Santa Barbara, CA 93101
(805) 690-7615 (office)
(888) 304-3456 (toll-free)
http://www.brooks.edu