If you are logged in to a workstation that is running the toehold service, you do not have to use kinit. The toehold login procedure will log you into Kerberos automatically. You will need to use kinit only in those situations in which your original tickets have expired. (Tickets expire in about a day.) Note as well that toehold will automatically destroy your tickets when you logout from the workstation.
When you use kinit without options, the utility prompts for your username and Kerberos password, and tries to authenticate your login with the local Kerberos server.
If Kerberos authenticates the login attempt, kinit retrieves your initial ticket and puts it in the ticket file specified by your KRBTKFILE environment variable. If this variable is undefined, your ticket will be stored in the /tmp directory, in the file tktuid , where uid specifies your user identification number.
If you have logged in to Kerberos without the benefit of the workstation toehold system, make sure you use the kdestroy command to destroy any active tickets before you end your login session. You may want to put the kdestroy command in your .logout file so that your tickets will be destroyed automatically when you logout.
The options to kinit are as follows:
kerberos(1), kdestroy(1), klist(1), toehold(1)