Autologout of unused terminals

[Karl Kleinpaste]

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?

Perhaps I'm dense today, but I don't understand the question.  Any
process doing critical work has to protect itself from a variety of
sources of abuse.  And OSes protect themselves with (the non-UNIX
equivalent of) spl7() when entering a critical region.  And a lot of
applications perform checkpointing when they finish a large,
logically-complete chunk of some much larger task.  And so on...

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.

--Karl