[RHCE] Automatically. Logging off users after n secondsin unix m/c.

[sholton at mindspring.com]

Agreed.  You would want to call this from a sub-process of the login shell, not the 
login shell itself (as I had suggested) otherwise killing the parent process would 
kill ALL logins. DOH!  

But it's not hard to add a "suicide pill" to each shell in this way.

However, killing the parent wouldn't necessarily kill the children, but leave them
as orphans.  Probably not what you want. As Jon pointed out, doing something
like this would likely encourage the...um....victim.... to just find a way around
it.  You're launching an arms race which you will likely lose.

Have you thought about using 'talk <userid>'  instead? ;-)

I suspect for a serious treatment of this application you'd want to install
some sort of process accounting software, perhaps there's something
from http://freshmeat.net which would suffice.


-- 
Steve Holton
sholton at mindspring.com