Can a tty be locked?

[Darrell Allen]

Is there some way to lock a tty session whether it be just a dumb terminal, a terminal emulation program, or even a dtterm or xterm window?

Thanks,

Darrell

[John Wright · Accepted solution]

Darrell,

You could try lock which will prompt for a password that will unlock the terminal.
see man 1 lock

John

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Sorry Darrell, I don't think this dog will hunt in a general purpose way. Of course, there is the trivial case of the CDE screen lock but I've been thinking through the system calls and there just is no generalized way to do this.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi:

John's approach will certainly work if the user is at the shell but for the general case where the user is within an application, lock cannot be invoked.

[Alexander M. Ermes]

Hi there.
A tty will not be accessible, if you change the rights to 444.
Rgds
Alexander M. Ermes

[Darrell Allen]

Thanks all,

John, that's what I was looking for. It's been several years since I used it and I had forgotten it.

Clay, I hadn't even thought about the user being in a application. I was particularly thinking of my own session and I'm generally at the shell.

Alexander, where you referring to chmod on the /dev/tty/... file itself? I tried it (even went to 000 and chown root) but I was still able to use the tty session (as a non-root user).

When the dog won't hunt, sell him to your neighbor!

Darrell