Termlock blanks a curses compatible character terminal (e.g. xterm, eterm, PuTTY, konsole, dtterm, etc ...) and locks it. To unlock the terminal a password must be entered. The password, or rather the password hash, is stored in ~/.termlock. Basically it's like a password protected screensaver for character terminals. Written in pure Python it should be immediately usable on any machine with Python and curses (or a compatible library such as ncurses) installed.

Usage

The password switch prompts the user for a password (which must be confirmed) and uses this to create the ~/.termlock hash file.

To lock the screen simply call termlock with no options. If no ~/.termlock file can be found then an error prompting the user to create it will be displayed

Install

Termlock uses the standard Python distribution utilities. So it should just be a case of uncompressing the archive and running:

Obviously the user running this must have sufficient permissions to create a file in the install directory.

To Do

Currently termlock requires the use of the ~/.termlock file. This is because there is no standard way in Python (across all platforms) to access the system wide password information in /etc/shadow. If/when one is added to the Python standard library, termlock will be updated to support it.