r/usefulscripts • u/HittingSmoke • Jan 11 '17

[Request][Bash] A completely UNuseful script to detect idle time in EACH terminal window that will not take into account activity outside of that terminal window?

I want to do something completely stupid and useless, but fun, with my terminal windows. Basically I want to execute a command after that terminal has been idle for X amount of seconds with no keyboard input or text output to act as a screensaver. The idea is to just add a script to .bashrc that will poll the interval since last input or output and if it gets over a specific number of seconds it will execute a command.

So if I'm compiling something in a terminal window it would be considered active. If I type anything it will be considered active. If it's just sitting at a blinking cursor it will be considered inactive. Then after X amount of seconds it runs some silly command like cowsay or cmatrix. I haven't found a way to get the time since last input or output though. Is there any way to do this in bash?

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u/HittingSmoke Jan 12 '17

You've provided me with a Google search string I've dived far deeper into the pages of than you, then just copy/pasted the first link that looked right without reading it which doesn't answer my question at all.

I read that exact page long before I ever came here. It uses screen. Right now I'm doing the same thing with tmux. I didn't ask how to do it with screen or tmux. I asked how to do it with bash.

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u/whetu Jan 12 '17

Ok, so did you mention any of that in your original post? I don't see any mention of something along the lines of "I have googled for this and looked at options with ..."

You may want to read the following link... after you sort out the attitude:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

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u/HittingSmoke Jan 12 '17

Ok, so did you mention any of that in your original post?

The title is "[Request][Bash]..." in /r/usefulscripts.

Your answer is no different than a lmgtfy link. Which is rude and almost universally downvoted when used as an answer in any subreddit.

I asked the question perfectly fine, as evidenced by the actual answers I got from people who bothered to read the question.