[Discuss] cron notifications to GUI front end

[worley at alum.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley)]

>> On Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 10:28:02AM -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:
>> > I have a crontab task to shutdown my system at a specific time each
>> > evening. Shutdown notifications come to terminal windows that are open.

Before X Windows, you could have the task look at the modification time
of /dev/tty or some such, since every keystroke updated mod time of the
keyboard device.  X Windows circumvents that, but there still are screen
savers that turn on when the keyboard/mouse have been idle long enough.
So that information is being kept track of somewhere.  Perhaps you could
configure X to use a "screen saver" whose actual effect is to update
~/.in-use with "idle" or "in use".

Dale