inactive's Introduction

Command `inactive`

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

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