Pervent gnome terminal window from closing if unused for too long I'm running gnome in a VM. I leave the VM up all the time, even when I sign out of VNC. Lately I have noticed when I come back in the next morning all the terminal windows I had open have closed, presumably due to timing out after a night of inactivity. I want to prevent this from happening. I find it annoying to reopen and position my terminals. more importantly checking what is on my terminals is one of the things that helps me remember what I was doing when I had to log off the night before. How can I prevent them from closing?

The `bash`, `ksh`, and `zsh` shells all interpret the environment variable `TMOUT`, if set to a positive integer, as the maximum number of seconds to wait for a command in an interactive shell before exiting due to idleness. They issue a warning message, but you will not see it as your terminal will disappear. `ksh` seems to provide an extra 60 seconds after the warning.

The same variable is used to set the default timeout for `read` and `select` in `bash` scripts.