Overview

Idlewatcher will execute a command after a specified idle timeout period. By default, after one hour, it will execute systemctl suspend, if all logged-in ttys and Wayland are idle. If Wayland isn’t running, or if idlewatcher could not connect to it, it will only look at logged-in ttys. It uses the atime field of each tty to determine idleness, which is updated on user input, but not output from any running programs.

Installation

To build with rust, clone with repository and run ‘cargo build –release’ from the source directory. The executable will be target/release/idlewatcher.

You can use the included idlewatcher.service unit file to automatically launch idlewatcher as a user service with systemd. Be sure to edit the file to indicate where you copied the binary to, then execute:

$ systemctl --user --now enable idlewatcher.service

Usage Notes

It currently accepts two (optional) command line arguments to control its behavior: -t and -c. -t specifies the timeout interval in seconds, and -c specifies the command to run upon reaching the idle limit. If you specify a custom -c command with arguments, be sure to enclose the entire block with quotes, to ensure it is parsed correctly:

$ idlewatcher -c 'my_program_to_execute arg1 arg2 ...'

Output is logged to stdout/stderr; you can see it in the systemd journal:

$ journalctl --user -u idlewatcher will show any error messages.

License

Idlewatcher is released under the MIT License