[ Thanks to Mike
Golvach for this link. ]
“(I wrote this on Solaris 10 and looked at SUSE Linux
9, but found no love 🙂 Instead, I found that I needed to run ps,
extract the pty associated with the process from that (if it
existed – which is an exception the script catches) and then use
either who or w to retrieve the idle time associate with the pty.“See what I mean? Shouldn’t it be a little bit less of a hassle
than that?“Okay. I’ll admit, if it was, I wouldn’t be having half the fun
I’m having now trying to script it all out for myself 😉 So far,
what I’ve put together works fairly well, although I’m not 100%
certain that it’s bullet-proof so I would recommend that you leave
the “business end” of the code commented out (The stuff that
performs unforgivable actions, like killing ;). I have a hard time
reproducing it, but I can swear that this code will (every once in
a good while) determine that a process that hasn’t been idle at all
(which removes a column from the “w -s” output) has been idle too
long. I’m still working on that part and welcome any suggestions
regarding the script, how to make it better, why I’m doing
everything the wrong (and/or hard) way when I don’t need to and any
other constructive criticism :)”