Hi folks, a question: I've been thinking about the TV series LOST, and the famous countdown timer (reset whenever someone did something to reset the countdown to the beginning). I was wondering about this for storing some transient data in an array of some kind for non-nefarious purposes, of course. :-)

The data, let's say of the format:

"first name", "last name", "time first entered/renewed"

Where "time first entered/renewed" is the last recorded activity of a person, say in UNIX time (seconds since Jan 1, 1970). Now let's say that a program has created this record and gives the user a expiry of 600 seconds. If there's no activity, remove the entry. If there's activity, reset the timer back to 600s. If there's a new user, create the record and set the countdown on.

Now, how would one do this if there were multiple records of users that were last active at various times? Also, how would one display this info (either interactively or in a dump of the array to file every 30 seconds?

In reply to tracking transient data in memory by countdown timer by Anonymous Monk

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