[Tutor] User identification and running in the background.

[Tim Golden]

| I've had a quick scan around and can't find a way to identify the user
| who is logged in on the machine while a script is running? I've seen a
| few mentions of it being possible using bits of the win32 library but
| I would have liked my software to be portable with no adjustments.
| 
| How can I run a script in the background? I will be writing a
| (prototype) machine control interface and would like the users to be
| able to log out, but leave the script running. When the next user logs
| in they can open up a portal (preferably in the system tray) to give
| them control of the system again. When I link this to the user
| identification I would be able to vary the access to the machine
| depending on the access rights of the user.

I very much doubt if even the rest of what you're
doing is going to be particularly portable, so I
wouldn't worry too much if the logged-on user bit
isn't either. It looks to me as though you're
working at O/S-specific level. Python doesn't
offer any particular abstraction over detached
processes etc. In Windows you'd have to use a Service,
in *nix a daemon (I think).

To talk about possibilities on Windows which I know
better, it should be possible to have a service
running which can be messaged to by a desktop app
run from the system tray or elsewhere. When the
desktop app sends its signal to the service it could
send through the SID or Token of the logged on user 
which the service could then use to authorise or
not.

But this is all quite Win32-specific (as well as
being hand-wavingly unspecific). I don't know
how you'd go about it on *nix but I bet it's nothing
like the same.

TJG

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