Reading the process table, writing to pty's

[Anton Rang]

I'm looking for two things.  The first is a "good" way to read the
process table--in other words, one that isn't likely to break with
every release of the OS.  A little background: I have a program to
kill "idle" (non-CPU using) processes.  I have currently hacked around
the code from "ps" to read the proc. table, but it's very ugly.  Is
there some nice library out there somewhere?  This is on a Sun-3.
  The next question is fairly simple.  How do I find out what terminal
a process is associated with?  What I *really* want is to have a way
to write a warning message ("You will be killed in 10 minutes" for
example) to a process.  The implementation of "ps", at least on the
Sun-3 under 3.x, seems to be broken in this regard; "background" jobs
should show up without a terminal, and various processes seem to
attach themselves at random to a terminal ("in.syslog" for example).
  Finally, one last question.  I would like to find out if there is
anyone logged onto a pseudo-terminal.  Actually, what I *really* want
is a way to keep open() from hanging when the terminal located for the
process isn't logged on.  Right now I just use fork() before the
open() so that when the process hangs it doesn't stop the bouncer
program from running; it is idle, so eventually bouncer kills its own
subprocesses.  This is a real mess though.
  So...is there anyone out there with some good ideas about this?
Please E-mail responses, as I don't have time to read this newsgroup
all the time.  Thanks in advance.  (I may post a summary, so if you
don't want your article or name included in one, let me know.)
  Thanks again!

+---------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| Anton Rang (grad student) | "VMS Forever!"         | "Do worry...be SAD!" |
| Michigan State University | rang at cpswh.cps.msu.edu |                      |
+---------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+