Updated May 2025; see History
IATIMEOUT=<minutes>
Example: IATIMEOUT=60
IATIMEOUT activates an inactivity timer that will shut down a session if it has been inactive—no keyboard input or ASB/LIT instructions—for at least <minutes>. In practice, the actual delay until the timeout is detected and the job is shutdown may be as much as twice the specified number of minutes. The default value is 0, meaning no inactivity timer.
The –cgi command line switch automatically sets the IATIMEOUT to 7 seconds.
See History note below.
Comments
The process of determining whether a session is truly inactive is fairly complicated. Since the objective is to close down jobs that have obviously been abandoned, rather than precisely limit users to N minutes of inactivity, the timing program was built to err on the side of too long rather than too short. Consequently, as mentioned above, the actual timeout period may be quite a bit longer than the setting.
See Also
History
2025 May, A-Shell 1772: When the inactivity timer expires, as long as the session is running an application program and not waiting on an ATE operation (e.g. XTREE, GUI INFLD, etc.), it will now beep and present a message box telling the user the session is about to time out, allowing up to 10 seconds to cancel the timeout. In addition, provided the SIGHUP TRACE option is enabled, inactivity checkpoint messages will be added to the ashlog for periods of inactivity lasting 1/4 of the IATIMEOUT value. This improves forensic confidence that the timeout is working as expected, as users are often doubtful!.
