Autologout of unused terminals

[Charlie Geyer]

In article <KARL.88Dec1155436 at triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu> 
karl at triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) writes:
>gwyn at smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn ) writes:
>   and anyway why should a process have to
>   disable SIGHUP in order to do its natural job?
>
>I guess my question is, Why shouldn't a process be responsible for its
>entire state, short of the superuser attack with SIGKILL?  I write a
>lot of code that has to survive disconnection from the controlling
>terminal, at least long enough to clean up and leave the world in a
>sane state.

Just out of curiosity, how do I get my login shell to ignore SIGHUP?
If I log in, fire up X windows, run xterm on a remote machine talking
to the X server on my machine, the login shells on my machine (two of
them, the console hidden by X and my root X window) may be idle for 
long periods of time.  But I'm sitting here typing away at the keyboard
and the pseudo-ttys associated with the xterm's on the remote machine
have only very short idle times.  If you send SIGHUP to either of the
login shells on my machine, I lose everything.  I'm sitting here
looking at a login prompt.  

UNIX doesn't just talk to dumb terminals anymore.  Maybe "Autologout 
of unused terminals" is a bad idea.  If implemented, it should come
with an easy way that any user can defeat it, and then what's the
point?