On Wed, 14 Jul 2010, Robert Nesius wrote: > This reminded me of an anecdotal statistic. While in college only > faculty and grad students had access to workstations on the network that > they did not have to close their sessions on (This is pre-linux, you > young whipper-snappers). As such it became some sort of a > geek-bragging-right to have a shell that was idle for ridiculous amounts > of time. It was like saying "I don't have to log out and I have so much > computing power at my disposal I don't NEED that shell! In fact I have > so many shells I've LOST that shell." > > So when I finally got my own workstation/office as a student intern I > had an xterm that I very very carefully never typed in to let it's idle > time climb up so that when people ran finger they could see one of my > sessions was idle for MONTHS! I'd run the command myself sometimes and > congratulate myself for being a made man, with my own ridiculously high > idle-time shell. Yeah. My office mates even knew about my "special > shell" that I was cultivating, and thus were immensely amused when I > finally accidentally typed 'ls' in my super-idle shell one day. GAH! > > Anyway - you can all laugh at me now. Geez -- I don't know what those old processes are doing... $ finger Login Name Tty Idle Login Time Office Office Phone mbmiller Mike Miller tty7 225d Dec 1 2009 (:0) mbmiller Mike Miller pts/0 1d Dec 1 2009 (:0.0) mbmiller Mike Miller pts/1 Jun 14 00:51 (:1.0) mbmiller Mike Miller pts/2 28d Dec 1 2009 (:1.0) mbmiller Mike Miller pts/3 144d Dec 9 2009 (:1.0) mbmiller Mike Miller pts/4 1d May 1 20:22 (:1.0) mbmiller Mike Miller pts/5 40d Dec 14 2009 (:1.0) mbmiller Mike Miller pts/6 34d Dec 21 2009 (:1.0) mbmiller Mike Miller pts/7 41d Jan 4 2010 (:1.0) mbmiller Mike Miller pts/8 5:37 Feb 10 16:18 (:1.0) mbmiller Mike Miller pts/9 13d Jan 6 2010 (:1.0) mbmiller Mike Miller pts/10 21:54 Jan 14 16:48 (:1.0) mbmiller Mike Miller pts/11 125d Feb 16 14:44 (:1.0) mbmiller Mike Miller pts/12 33d Feb 24 14:09 (:1.0) mbmiller Mike Miller pts/13 15d Feb 26 11:19 (:1.0) mbmiller Mike Miller pts/14 89d Apr 10 01:01 (:1.0) mbmiller Mike Miller pts/15 76d Apr 24 15:11 (:1.0) mbmiller Mike Miller pts/16 33d Apr 28 14:29 (:1.0) mbmiller Mike Miller pts/18 5:32 May 24 19:16 (:1.0) mbmiller Mike Miller pts/19 12d Jun 3 03:35 (:1.0) mbmiller Mike Miller pts/20 1d Jun 16 16:48 (:1.0) mbmiller Mike Miller pts/21 5:38 Jun 18 02:58 (:1.0) mbmiller Mike Miller pts/22 9d Jul 3 20:04 (:1.0) Gotta clean that thing up! Mike