Programming

Hi,

I'm trying to write a C program that finds idle login sessions on RHEL6 and kill the sessions which are idle(inactive) for, say, more than 15 minutes. I tried to use procfs.h is my code. But it doesn't seem to support enough API's as OS Solaris does.(Solaris supports API's that can populate structures for process status).
Now I am thinking of using /proc myself to do this. Can someone help me with the following?
I need to get the pid from the process name(eg. bash/ssh or some other login sessions) - this can be done using popen.
Then,
1) Find the inactive time for that pid using /proc file system
2) In case of bash, make sure it's not from a console session

Then if both the above conditions are satisfied kill the process and hence kill the session.

Could someone please help with point 1 and 2?

why not just use the TMOUT variable inside the shell instead of shoehorning a solution from the outside?

Afaik, TMOUT is possible for shell logins. But I need to consider the sessions like some Command Line Interface applications also. For those cases I think we need the C approach itself. What do you think?

What is that?

There are some provisioning applications running on the server which also use login mechanisms. The users which are using such applications may not use any shell login (Instead they can login through a GUI from outside).
And a doubt here, even if they login to a shell and launch such an application and become idle, will the shell be considered idle? I think the shell will remain active! In such a case TMOUT may not help me.

So I need to consider those sessions for inactivity time too. I mean, if such a login session is in progress, I need to kill that session first. Am I right?

You are correct. When a command is being run, the shell won't consider itself to be idle.

It would still be better to work with the applications and window environments than to try and extract idle information from outside. Process statistics are likely completely useless with respect to how long the user has been idle.

I didn't quite get it. Could you please explain? An example will be useful I think. Sorry for troubling, I'm new to these kinds of problems