Log out other user w/o first switching to that user My wife use separate accounts and quick user switching on a MBP running 10.6. Sometimes I want to log her out to free up some RAM, but I'd like to avoid logging in as her, logging out, then logging back in as me.

I have seen a terminal solution... is there a better way? Thanks!
Using the Terminal, you can kill her loginwindow process and any programs she has open will be closed... but this will cause her to lose any unsaved work she has! In fact, this is the very reason you need to log in as her to log out: When you log in as her, all her programs again have access to the GUI, so they can prompt you to confirm closure, save changes or take other action before logging out.

If you're sure that she only has things like a web browser, iTunes, etc open, not Pages, Word, Photoshop, or anything else with documents, then you could try from the terminal:

kill `ps awwwwux | grep her_short_username | grep loginwindow | grep -v grep | awk "{ print \$2 }"`


On OSX 10.10.4: (slight edit from last comment): 

export pn=`ps awwwwux | awk '/her_short_username/ &amp;&amp; /loginwind[o]w/ { print $2 }'`
sudo kill -9 $pn