Autologout of unused terminals

[dlp at gistdev.UUCP]

I wrote a routine for a customer to watch for idle terminals and kill
them if they were inactive for longer than N minutes.  People who were
logged off by this routine received mail to that effect.

A few days after the program was installed, many people had this in their
.profile files:
	while sleep 55
	do cat /dev/null >> /dev/tty
	done &

Other people had routines to download a text file to their PCs, start up their
favorite editor, and upload the file when they were finished editiing.  Some
of these people did not have the dirty trick in their .profile files, and
discovered that they had lost half an hour's editing by being "inactive".  On
the whole, I think it was a BAD idea.

Dirk Pellett -- standard disclaimers apply.