Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu!karl
From: karl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Autologout of unused terminals
Message-ID: 
Date: 1 Dec 88 20:54:36 GMT
References: <201.nlunix6@orcenl.uucp> <8978@smoke.BRL.MIL> <2682@sultra.UUCP> <9012@smoke.BRL.MIL> <213.nlunix6@orcenl.uucp> <9032@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Organization: OSU
Lines: 18
In-reply-to: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL's message of 1 Dec 88 18:39:44 GMT

gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn ) writes:
   and anyway why should a process have to
   disable SIGHUP in order to do its natural job?

Perhaps I'm dense today, but I don't understand the question.  Any
process doing critical work has to protect itself from a variety of
sources of abuse.  And OSes protect themselves with (the non-UNIX
equivalent of) spl7() when entering a critical region.  And a lot of
applications perform checkpointing when they finish a large,
logically-complete chunk of some much larger task.  And so on...

I guess my question is, Why shouldn't a process be responsible for its
entire state, short of the superuser attack with SIGKILL?  I write a
lot of code that has to survive disconnection from the controlling
terminal, at least long enough to clean up and leave the world in a
sane state.

--Karl