[comp.unix.questions] Want to implement timeout for hardwired terminals

jay@hqda-ai.ARPA (Jay Heiser) (12/06/88)

Second question of the week:
All of my users have an office automation system (OFFICE POWER) as
their shell, and it is NOT modifyable.   Our O/S is unix SysVR2. Our
manager would like us to implement timeout, so that users inactive
over 30 minutes would have their session killed.  Users in an
application (word processing, mail, etc) who are not typing, will show
idle time on 'ps -ef'.  Users at the main menu, which has a clock that
is updated every minute, usually don't show any idle time.

What's the best way to identify & kill these inactive sessions?  A
shell script run from cron every 5 minutes?  A daemon written in C?

While we're at it, when is someone going to port the 'top' util
(screen oriented, shows top 10 processes) from bsd to SysV?  That &
'sps' are very useful for keeping your finger on a system's pulse.
-- 
jay heiser
jay@pentagon-ai.army.mil
hqda-ai!jay