Program to log off idle users
Nicole Delbecque & Paul Bijnens
FFAAC09 at cc1.kuleuven.ac.be
Fri Oct 12 02:26:14 AEST 1990
>>The trouble with all these idle timeout schemes is that they rely on the idle
>>time on the particular /dev/tty device.
>>
>>1) You don't really want to kill all such sessions, what about people who jus
>> ...
>>2) This just doesn't work. If an application is talking to /dev/tty instead
>>of the particular port, it's the times on /dev/tty, not /dev/tty?? that get
>>updated. Our most popular editor round here works like this. Even the ones
>>that try to be clever and go hunting down the process list looking for busy
>>processes don't work, after 127 seconds you can't tell how long a process has
>>been idle:
>...
>What I do now that seems to work is to use a hacked version of csh
>which has a timeout if it sits at the prompt too long. The timeout is
>set by a variable in the user's environment.
If you don't have sources, this little Bourne-shell program, called
"alive" can help sometimes (execute it from the /dev/tty??? in question):
# alive -- give signes of life on this terminal
if [ -z "$MYTTY" ]
then # fork into the background
cd /
MYTTY=`tty`; export MYTTY
nice -19 $0 $* &
exit 0
fi
while touch -m $MYTTY
do sleep ${1:-3600}
done
> In addition I run an
>idlekiller of the sort described in the original article about 3 times
>a day -- once after most people have gone home and once just before
>they arrive for the day and once after midnight. This catches the
>forgetful emacs users.
Yes, a good advice: if you want to run that idle-killer, give it
a real long permitted idle-time, or don't run it at all.
--
Polleke
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