It is both curious and sad that many Linux veterans have not heard of the screen command. Curious because they needlessly go to extra effort to replicate what screen takes in its stride and sad because they are missing a powerful tool that would benefit them greatly.
You connect to a server via SSH and are working at the remote shell. You need to open another shell window so you can have the two running side by side; perhaps you want the output from top in one window while typing in another. What do you do? Most people would open another SSH connection, but that is both wasteful and unnecessary. screen is a terminal multiplexer, which is a fancy term for a program that lets you run multiple terminals inside one terminal.
The best way to learn screen is to try it yourself, so open a console, type screen, and then press Enter. Your display will blank momentarily and then be replaced with a console; it will look like nothing has changed. Now, let's do something with that terminal. Run top and leave it running for the time being. Hold down the Ctrl key and press a (referred to as Ctrl+a from now on); then let go of them both and press c. Your prompt will clear again, leaving you able to type. Run the uptime command.
What happened to the old terminal running top? It is still running, of course. You can type Ctrl+a and then press 0 to return to it. Type Ctrl+a and then press 1 to go back to your uptime terminal. While you are viewing other terminals, the commands in the other terminals carry on running as normal so you can multitask.
Many of screen's commands are case sensitive, so the lettering used here is very specific: Ctrl+a means "press Ctrl and the a key," but Ctrl+A means "press Ctrl and Shift and the a key" so you get a capital A. Ctrl+a+A means "press Ctrl and the a key, let them go, and then press Shift and the a key."
You have seen how to create new displays and how to switch between them by number. However, you can also bring up a window list and select windows using your cursor with Ctrl+a+" (that is, press Ctrl and a together, let go, and press the double quotes key [usually Shift and the single quote key]). You will find that the screens you create have the name bash by default, which is not very descriptive. Select a window and press Ctrl+a+A. You are prompted to enter a name for the current window, and your name is used in the window list.
Once you get past window 9, it becomes impossible to switch to windows using Ctrl+a and 09; as soon as you type the 1 of 10, screen switches to display 1. The solution is to use either the window list or the quick change option, in which you press Ctrl+a+' (single quote), enter either the screen number or the name you gave it, then press Enter. You can also change back to the previous window by pressing Ctrl+a+Ctrl+a. If you only work within a small set of windows, you can use Ctrl+a+n and Ctrl+a+p to move to the next and previous windows, respectively. Of course, if you are changing to and from windows only to see whether something has changed, you are wasting time because screen can monitor windows for you and report if anything changes. To enable (or disable) monitoring for a window, use Ctrl+a+M; when something happens, screen flashes a message. If you miss it (the messages disappear when you type something), use Ctrl+a+m to bring up the last message.
Windows close when you kill the main program inside. Using Ctrl+a+c, this window is Bash; type exit to quit. Alternatively, you can use Ctrl+a+K to kill a window. When all your windows are closed, screen terminates and prints a screen is terminating message so you know you are out.
However, there are two alternatives to quitting: locking and disconnecting. The first, activated with Ctrl+a+x, locks access to your screen data until you enter your system password. The second is the most powerful feature of screen: You can exit it and do other things for a while and then reconnect later and screen will pick up where you left off. For example, you could be typing at your desk, disconnect from screen, then go home, reconnect, and carry on as if nothing had changed. What's more, all the programs you ran from screen carry on running even while screen is disconnected. It even automatically disconnects for you if someone closes your terminal window while it is in a locked state (with Ctrl+a+x).
To disconnect from screen, press Ctrl+a+d. You are returned to the prompt from which you launched screen and can carry on working, close the terminal you had opened, or even log out completely. When you want to reconnect, run the command screen -r. You can, in the meantime, just run screen and start a new session without resuming the previous one, but that is not wise if you value your sanity! You can disconnect and reconnect the same screen session as many times you want, which potentially means you need never lose your session again.
Source of Information : Ubuntu Unleashed
4 comments:
very handy tip. I had heard of screen a while back, but never really used it. I'll try this tomorrow when I start working on my next computer architecture project.
screen is more versatile than that...very handy tips, i will add a few more things some of them being very hard to find:
- ctrl+a+space = next window;
- ctrl+backspace = previous window;
- ctrl+a shift+: = bring on message bar;
-in the message bar, among other things you can do a "chat to all windows" command by:
- ctrl+a shift+: and then in the message bar you write:
at "#" stuff "pwd\015" - "#" means "in all windows", "stuff" the command pwd and \015 simulates an enter;
- next time if you want to repeat this command to all windows :
ctrl+a shift+: and then up arrow, modify if you need to alter it a bit and then press enter;
If you only want to send a command to a certain window or a group of windows you can type instead # the name of the window or a part of the name followed by a "*".
More useful info is needed about this tool that should be easy to find instead of looking for the info in some mailed threads and stuff;
Regards.
Very nice tutorial !
But when I use it, I can not use my backspace key to delete text at the command prompt ??
As an emacs user the first thing I did was add the following to my .screenrc:
escape ^]]
Other cool things one can do in .screenrc:
+ Large text buffer:
defscrollback 50000
+ EMACS-like editing keys:
markkeys "0=^a:$=^e:^f=^v:^b=^p:w=^f:b=^b"
+ Split the window horizontally...
bind s split
+ ... and unsplit
bind u only
Anyway, there's tons more, "screen" is awesome (too bad it's un-Googable!)
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