TIMEOUT variable in bourne shell

[joekwchen]

Hi all

I'm using Solaris and I need to set the TIMEOUT variable in bourne shell (/sbin/sh). I've read somewhere and it's supposed to be TIMEOUT=5;export TIMEOUT
but it doesn't work.

TMOUT on ksh works perfectly.

Does anyone know how to set timeout in bourne shell?

Thanks.

 

[KenCunningham]

What is the value of $SHELL when you're doing this. It might make a difference.

 

[julianbarnett]

Looks like this functionality is not available in Solaris Bourne Shell. I believe it should have been introduced at SVR4.2. It only works in Korn and Bash shells on Solaris.

From SUN Infodoc ID14089...

A) The login session.
The entry in the /etc/default/login file:

# TIMEOUT sets the number of seconds (between 0 and 900) to wait before
# abandoning a login session.
#
#TIMEOUT=300

defines the number of seconds the login process will wait on an attempted login for a response to the login prompt. For example, if you have the TIMEOUT value set to 120, then when you &quot;telnet <hostname>&quot;, you will have 120 seconds, or 2 minutes, to enter a login name before it closes the connection.

The default is 300 seconds, or 5 minutes.


B) The shell session. (Korn and Bash shells only, /usr/bin/ksh and /usr/bin/bash)

The TMOUT environment variable is what controls Korn and Bash shell inactivity timeout. If it is unset, or has a value of 0, then timeout is disabled. If it is set to a value greater than zero, then the shell will terminate if a command is not entered in the specified number of seconds in the TMOUT variable.

The TMOUT variable can be set in /etc/profile for all users, or in an individual's $HOME/.profile.

Note: There is no TMOUT equivalent for either the bourne (/bin/sh) or C (/bin/csh) shells. Also, it only works for login sessions which use simple shells (like telnet or rlogin). It will NOT automatically logout from a CDE or Openwindows session. However, if the TMOUT variable is set in /etc/profile as shown above, any terminal window within CDE will exit after exceeding the TMOUT idle value. That might not be a desirable thing.

 

[joekwchen]

Ken
my $SHELL is /sbin/sh

Julian
Thanks for your comment. Can I say that there's no TMOUT equivalent for Solaris Bourne shell? (I'm using Solaris 8)

Thanks all.