Autologout of unused terminals

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <2682 at sultra.UUCP> dtynan at sultra.UUCP (Der Tynan) writes:
>Anyway, perhaps you'd like to let me know
>why it's such a terrible sin to kill these jobs.

Because any automated scheme you come up is likely to ALSO kill off
some perfectly legitimate jobs.

I have, nearly every day, important connections between a "terminal"
and a host computer that appear to have no activity on them for a
long time, sometimes hours.  However, the connections are needed and
cannot be opened only at the time they are active; they must be
arranged in advance then just sit there.  An automatic "kill idle
terminal" daemon would wreak havoc with this.

There are many ways to deal with careless terminal users other than
automatic idle-terminal killer software.