There is an escape sequence to direct the closing of a ZTERM session, but is there anything that would disable the "X" (close) button in the upper-right corner while a network connection is active.

I want to force users to exit the application "properly," and prevent them from closing ZTERM at any arbitrary point in the application.

The first one that comes to mind is done locally in each zterm configuration. Goto configuration, Safe tab. I have used this alot. There is a lot of different ways to use it.

One was to not disconnect on less there was the word MENU at a certian ROW/COL then I knew the user was a the main menu.

Another one is the password to prevent a red x disconnect.

If you are worried about the operator changing the configuration back, under options you can lock the configuration or select simple menu. Then of course to ever change it again, you would have to erase the profile on that user's PC.

If this is of interest, checkout Zterm's help contents.

Have a nice rest of the day.

In ZTERM, the approach to that problem is via the "Safe" (i.e. Safe Disconnection) tab in the Configuration dialog. It doesn't allow you to disable the "X", but it does allow you to define a message box/prompt and optional password to warn/guard against an unsafe disconnection. The main limitation is that I don't think you can define it or disable via ESC sequence. But you can define a "safe string" (some message at a known position on the screen) that it will detect as an indication that the current screen is safe to disconnect from without warning. This works well if your main menu has some unique identifying string, not so well otherwise. But it is difficult to just turn the feature on, due to the need to get it set up on each PC (unless you work out some scheme to update the registry, which is where the information is stored, from the server without user intervention).

For comparison, in ATE, we don't have the "safe string" mechanism, but you can remove the "X" (via the -mx command line switch), and you can define/enable/disable a dialog and password to prevent disconnection at any time via the TAB(-10,AG_DISCONNECTPW) command.

However, none of these methods can stop the "three finger salute" or the reset button. Which is why ultimately you need to be able to detect disconnects and close down gracefully. (A-Shell normally does a pretty good automatic job of that under UNIX, but in some cases it may require you to detect error 250 and/or 251 and do something specific in order to tie up loose ends on some critical process.)

Thanks for the feedback Ken and Jack. I should be able to gin up something from what you've suggested.

My problem is more one of orderliness than anything else. I've never had a serious problem that I can trace to a dropped connections, but I would like to force users to exit properly as this lowers the risk of even minor problems.