---
name: "wayland-logout"
section: "1"
platform: "linux"
package: "wf-shell"
version: "0.11.0-1"
release: "Arch Linux 2026-11-01"
platforms: ["linux"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/wayland-logout"
---

# wayland-logout(1)

generic logout utility for wayland compositors

## NAME

**wayland-logout** – generic logout utility for wayland compositors

## DESCRIPTION

**wayland-logout** is a compositor agnostic utility for simulating a logout with any wayland compositor.

It sends a **SIGTERM** [signal(3)](/signal/3.md) to the running compositor **PID** which is obtained by looking at the environment variables.

## ENVIRONMENT

**wayland-logout** uses the WAYLAND\_DISPLAY and XDG\_RUNTIME\_DIR environment variables to get the [socket(2)](/socket/2.md) corresponding to the compositor instance.

## EXIT STATUS

**wayland-logout** exits with non-zero if an error has occurred along with the error reasoning and exits with 0 on success.

## EXAMPLES

To kill the current compositor instance, run inside the compositor environment:

```
$ wayland-logout
```

A typical use case, to kill a specific compositor instance of another user (with uid=1002), run as the other user (or as root):

```
$ env -i XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1002 WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-4 wayland-logout
```

or

```
$ WAYLAND_DISPLAY=/run/user/1002/wayland-4 wayland-logout
```