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From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: watch-dog program
Message-ID: <5848@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 8-May-87 11:54:59 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.5848
Posted: Fri May  8 11:54:59 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 9-May-87 19:27:17 EDT
References: <7305@brl-adm.ARPA>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 16

In article <7305@brl-adm.ARPA> rachiele@nadc.arpa writes:
>I am in need of an automatic logout program for unix sys V (2.2) running on
>a VAX785.  By this I mean, some software which will logout inactive
>users after some set amount of idle time.  Can anyone help me out?

This comes up every so often.  The general answer is, there is no good
way to determine that a user has really abandoned his terminal.  He might
be staring at the file he printed while he works out what to do next, or
he might be running a downloaded application that only occasionally needs
to access the host.

Some versions of the Bourne shell have a TIMEOUT variable that you can
set to the number of minutes for the shell to wait after a PS1 prompt
before giving up on the user interactive input and terminating the shell.
If you enable some such feature, please provide the users with a way of
disabling it (e.g. by setting TIMEOUT=0).