Question

I want my script to automatically log the current user out when the script has finished. It it to be ran on an Linux-based server (Ubuntu). I’ve tried this line of code, but it won’t work.

subprocess.call(['logout'])

Gave the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 493, in call
    return Popen(*popenargs, **kwargs).wait()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 679, in __init__
    errread, errwrite)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 1249, in _execute_child
    raise child_exception
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

I also tried:

subprocess.Popen(['sudo', 'logout'])

But then the user’ll have to enter his password to be logged out. Without sudo on this one I get:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 679, in __init__
    errread, errwrite)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 1249, in _execute_child
    raise child_exception
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

I do not want to run the script itself as root.

I want to be able to log a user directly out without them having to enter the password. When you use logout in a regular terminal you usually don’t have to enter the password, so I don’t really get why this is even an issue.

All help is greatly appreciated.

EDIT: I have found a solution to my problem by adding a little extra code to ~/.bash_login (see my answer), but why what I’m trying above has not been answered.

Answer 1

I found a solution to my problem. I added

sys.exit(1)

To my script.

Then I added the following code to ~/.bash_login

if [ "$?" == "0" ]; then
    logout
fi

So the logout-command runs when the Python-script is finished.