Use a PowerShell script to force logoff an RDP session

It's not a new problem: An end user logs in to a Windows server using Remote Desktop Protocol and then forgets to log off. When a session remains open, it continues to consume resources on the server unnecessarily. There's a PowerShell script you can use to force end users to log off and free up those resources.

To begin a force logoff of a user's Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) session, an admin must first query all the Remote Desktop Services' (RDS) server sessions on the machine and check their status. After detecting all disconnected services, the next step is the force logoff.

Download the free PowerShell module called PSTerminalServices and ensure it's available in your PowerShell. All the installation instructions are on the PSTerminalServices site.

The first step I'll take with this module is to see if I can get all of the active sessions on my lab server -- HYPERV (Figure 1).

Currently, I only have a couple sessions in a disconnected state. So, I'm seeing all of the sessions, but I only want to see those that are disconnected. To do that, I'll add the State parameter (Figure 2).

This is helpful, but there's still a problem. Session 0 is not an RDP session, and there’s no way to remove that from the result with Get-TSSession. I'll use Where-Object to remove that session as well (Figure 3).

Now, I can view all of the sessions I want to stop. Next, I just need to kill these sessions. To do this, the PSTerminalServices module has a Stop-TSSession cmdlet. This cmdlet does exactly what you think it does -- it kills the session (Figure 4).

The Stop-TSSession cmdlet forcefully logs off a session, which might cause end users to lose their work, so it prompts the admin. I could just hit "A" here and move on, but sometimes admins don't want to be prompted. If you plan to include this in a larger script, a prompt will break the script. The best bet is to remove that confirmation.

The Stop-TSSession cmdlet has a common PowerShell parameter, called –Force, which allows admins to perform the action without any confirmation.

Get-TSSession -ComputerName HYPERV -State Disconnected | where {$_.SessionID -ne 0} | Stop-TSSession -Force

If you receive no output, the session was logged off successfully.