determine active terminal

michal017 · 06-12-2007, 02:31 AM

Is it possible to determine which terminal is active at present?
In fact, it would be sufficient to determine whether a user is working in X or using tty console.
I need this to set up my instant messaging notifications (visual vs. audio) and my instant messaging online presenece (this is done using xscreensaver now, but when I'm working using console, it does not work as expected).
Thanks

wjevans_7d1@yahoo.co · 06-12-2007, 08:10 AM

You'll probably be writing a shell script to set up the instant messaging notifications, right?

Try putting this fragment in your shell script:

Code:

tty | grep dev.tt > /dev/null

if [ "$?" = "0" ]
then
  echo this guy is at a non-X console
else
  echo this guy is using X
fi

Hope this helps.

michal017 · 06-12-2007, 08:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by wjevans_7d1@yahoo.co

You'll probably be writing a shell script to set up the instant messaging notifications, right?

Yes

Quote:

Originally Posted by wjevans_7d1@yahoo.co

Try putting this fragment in your shell script:

Code:

tty | grep dev.tt > /dev/null

if [ "$?" = "0" ]
then
  echo this guy is at a non-X console
else
  echo this guy is using X
fi

Hope this helps.

Yes, but the script is running periodically from cron, so tty will report the terminal that the cron owns (if any), right?

wjevans_7d1@yahoo.co · 06-13-2007, 11:02 AM

I'm having difficulty making sense of this.

If this is being run from cron, just what do you want it to do? The cron daemon (crond) isn't being run from any screen or terminal or tty or anything. How do you want it to behave? Count the number of bash interactive shells being run from non-X consoles, and the number being run from xterm, and then take a majority vote or something? Or is there a cron job being run for every user shell window? What?

michal017 · 06-14-2007, 12:11 AM

See, for instance, the command w.
It shows a column called IDLE, which (most of the time) shows value of 0.00s for the terminal where you run the 'w' command. So the command 'w' knows which terminal is idle and for how long.
Now I'd like to have funcitionality similar to this.
The trick is this does not work if I run a 'screen' inside X and reattach it console.