UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Hi all.
I have a log file that the operators monitor. This file is simply tailed -f on a screen in the ops room. I would like to know if there is anyway I can disable the keyboard from any input other than physically unpluging it. Something like a trap in the script.

The system is AIX 5.2.

Thanks

J

To my knowledge there is no such way. You might protect the motoring output from the (hands of the) operators by using a shell construct like:

Code:

while : ; do
     tput clear
     tail -f25 <logfile>
done

and use "trap" to intercept anything they might try on the keyboard (especially the signals 1, 2 and 3). Additionally you could display the window with this process from another machine, but you would have to take care for the possiblity that the displaying machine gets rebooted then. A script watching over the process for the window and on demand restarting it should do this.

Hope this helps.

bakunin

Yes, you can trap the signals from the keyboard in your script and silently ignore them, provided of course that the shell you are using has this facility, for exaple yout would trap SIGINT to prevent ^C on the keyboard from stopping the script.