Hi!

I want to get the system idle time till a mouse move or a key press. How is it possible to get it from a char terminal running through ssh/telnet as well as a from an X-terminal session?

regards,
vasanth.

Depends on what you mean by "idle time" exactly, but for a start, run
and check out the column named "idle". Not sure what you mean by "X-terminal session", but you can run this from a shell or terminal emulator within X..

Remember that if you check the idle time of the user you're checking it as, you'll reset the counter too (because you're typing and/or moving mouse when doing it).

EDIT: the above means of course the idle time of some user(s), not the "system" idle time. I'd say that's the best idle time you can get, because the system itself is hardly ever truly idle, except for when it's shut down; there are always some processes going on.

Adding a note to an old thread in case this is of use to anybody else:

This post at crunchbang http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=26447 details a bash script to determine the time in seconds since the last mouse or keyboard action in the system. It doesn't depend on any X session or user being logged in since it's just looking at hardware interrupts. So for keyword searches: bash script for user idle / inactive time to suspend or lock