Command line tool that can be used to determine if a computer has not been active recently. I use it to make sure my machines don't get left on when I am not using them.
The basics of how it works:
- looks at all files named:
/tmp/stayawake.*, if any of the files have been modified in the last 25 minutes the command exits with a status of 1. - if the computer has an uptime of less than 5 minutes the command exits with a status of 1.
- if neither of the above are true the command exits with a status of 0.
As a result in order to keep your computer awake you just need to touch a file that looks
like /tmp/stayawake.\*, in my case I use my bash prompt to automatically touch a
file of that sort.
Example usage in a crontab (I have it run every 3 minutes):
*/3 * * * * /root/inactive && \
( test -f /run/nologin || /sbin/shutdown -h +5 ) || /sbin/shutdown -c
To install you can simply run go get github.com/nthnca/inactive.
NOTES:
- This command doesn't actually shut down the computer because of possible permission issues and different OSes may have different ways to shut the computer down.
- The check for /run/nologin is to see if a shutdown has already been scheduled, if so we don't want to schedule another shutdown since it will cancel the first shutdown ... basically resulting in a denial of service for shutting down... oops. :-)
- On my system to get the shutdown -h +5 command to work I had to run
sudo apt install --reinstall dbus