How to query users time of inactivity?

ranger719

Hi all,
I want to read my users idle time to do some time-based stuff after a certain amount of inactivity. I did not find a way to do this. I know that I can check /proc/diskstats to see if a drive was active (compare with earlier output). Is there a similar way to see if an input device was used (mouse/keyboard, both usb)? /dev/input/mice for example is not suitable, is it? Is there a simple tool? I searched google and this forum but nothing useful showed up. It would be great if someone knows a simple programm/way. A dcop call would be great, too.

Cheers

didymos · Posted: Tue Sep 04, 2007 6:30 pm Post subject:

Well, do you want to know the user's overall idle time for a given process, or do you actually need to know the last time they touched a device? For the former, the 'w' and 'who' commands can give you that (although it doesn't work for all processes). For the latter, I'm not sure how to check on that.
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Thomas S. Howard

ranger719 · Posted: Wed Sep 05, 2007 7:55 am Post subject:

I want to do it like a screensaver

I want to know when the user last hit a key or moved the mouse. w and who do not provide this information. AFAIK w or who printed out the idle time of the users, but I don't see how to do it. This feature seems to be gone. I checked both man-pages..

.yankee · Apprentice Joined: 24 Feb 2008 Posts: 194 Location: Polska

Hi there!
I know it's a bit old topic now, but since I've just been looking into the same problem, I decided to resurrect it

Anyway - what might help, is /proc/interrupts - for instance, grepping it for i8042 in a loop should provide feedback on whether the keyboard or mouse were recently used . The problem remains to learn which user actually triggered the interrupts.
Maybe there's something more useful in /sys?

Anyone has better ideas?