Stop Accidental Bourne Shell Logouts

It's pretty easy to type one too many CTRL-d characters and log out of a Bourne shell without meaning to. The C shell has an ignoreeof shell variable () that won't let you log out with CTRL-d. So do the Korn shell and bash; use set -o ignoreeof.

Here's a different sort of solution for the Bourne shell. When you end the shell, it asks if you're sure. If you don't answer yes, a new shell is started to replace your old one.

First, make a file like the C shell's logout that will be read whenyour Bourne shell exits . () Save your tty () name in an environment variable (), too-you'll need it later:

trap 

TTY=`tty`; export TTY trap '. $HOME/.sh_logout; exit' 0

(Your system may need $LOGDIR instead of $HOME.) Put the following lines in your new sh_logout file:

exec < case exec -sh 

exec < $TTY echo "Do you really want to log out? \c" read ans case "$ans" in [Yy]*) ;; *) exec $HOME/bin/-sh ;; esac

The last line is some trickery to start a new login shell (51.9). The shell closes your tty () before reading your sh_logout file; the exec < $TTY reconnects the shell's standard input to your terminal.

Note that if your system is very slow, you may not get the reminder message for a couple of seconds-you might forget that it's coming and walk away. That hasn't been a problem where I've tested this. If it is for you though, replace the read ans with a program like grabchars () that times out and gives a default answer after a while. There may be some Bourne shells that need other tricks-and others that don't need these tricks-but this should give you an idea of what to do.

- JP