Idle time logout mechanism (daemon)

[Rob McMahon]

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We were also having trouble with people forgetting to log off, many of our
users are fairly naive first year undergraduates.  We modified `sh' and `csh'
to prompt the user to hit return after 5 minutes of being idle, and log him
off if he didn't respond within another 2.5 minutes.  This has been working
quite well for those who just forget, and protects them from the malicious
people who come along and find them still logged in.

The talk of daemons makes me worry - on our system you cannot tell from the
modify time of the terminal whether a line is idle or not.  While people
are sitting in our favourite screen editor, they show up as idle to `w' and
such how ever busily they are typing - one of those daemons are our machine
would embarrass a lot of people!  Does no one else have this feature ?  I
believe it is a feature of `cbreak', although I have not spent the time
rummaging through the teletype driver to investigate.

(We're running 4.2bsd on a VAX780)

Rob McMahon, Computer Unit, Warwick University, UK
UUCP:   ...!mcvax!ukc!warwick!cudcv
JANET:  cudcv at uk.ac.warwk.daisy