Watch, Spy, whatever you wanna call it

[Keith Gabryelski]

In article <1990Oct2.022530.15042 at celebr.uucp> jbm at celebr.uucp
(John B. Milton) writes:
>In article <29835 at netnews.upenn.edu> kehoe at scotty.dccs.upenn.edu
(Brendan Kehoe) writes:
>[stuff about VMS WATCH]
>> Well, anyway, what's the deal? Has one ever been written for under
>>Unix? (With the plethora of hackers [old definition, not vernacular]
>>that have and are in the Unix world today, I'd be really surprised
>>if it hadn't.)  Ok, let's say it hasn't. Then how about what it'd
>>take to write one? I can think of a little theory (sharing their
>>device buffers, etc etc) but I can see that I'd probably know more
>>internals (how oddly appropriate) than I would ever want to if I
>>were to sit down and do this (preferably not alone). But that may
>>not be that bad.  Whatcha think?
>
>Hmm. As far as I know, this has not been done for UNIX. This was
>available under TOPS/20, I think it was called ADVISE.

I, infact, wrote one last weekend.  I will be posting it to alt.sources
in a few days.  In works under System V Release 4 STREAMS (and can be
ported to earlier streams versions).

>I would think that the appropriate way to implement it would be with
>a STREAMS module. The monitor program would open the tty device of
>the person to be monitored/assisted. The monitor would then push a
>monitor module onto the device and communicate with the module
>through ioctl() calls. One problem is that the tty (pty, sxt) device
>would have to be a STREAMS device. The monitor program could put the
>input/output through the tty in a window, look into the envp of the
>process to get the TERM variable (or dynamically figure out the term
>type), blah blah. The rest is just window dressing. Adapting to stty
>modes and such could be partially done by the monitor module.

Except for the TERM sillyness my advise programs does just this.

Pax, Keith