Question

ADDED: This question is now, I believe, subsumed by this one: Using GNU Screen completely transparently and automatically

See also this related question:
https://superuser.com/questions/147873/ssh-sessions-in-xterms-freeze-for-many-minutes-whenever-they-disconnect

Original question:

It would be nice if there were a way to ssh to a machine and immediately reconnect to a specific screen session. You can do this:

laptop> ssh server.com screen -ls 

and it will show a list of screens available on server.com like so [1]:

123.pts-1 456.pts-2 

And then you might try to do this:

laptop> ssh server.com screen -dr pts-2 

but that fails, saying ‘Must be connected to a terminal.’ You have to ssh in first and then do the ‘screen -dr pts-2’ on server.com which is no good if you have a flaky connection and get disconnected a lot. You want to be able to resume with a simple ‘up-arrow enter’ on the laptop. (Or perhaps make it even more automatic.)

I have a rihackulous solution to this problem which I’ll post as an answer and hope it gets downvoted to oblivion in favor of the Right Way to deal with this.

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Footnotes:

[1] Or, better, if you created the screen sessions with names like ‘screen -S foo‘ and ‘screen -S bar‘ then you’ll get a friendlier list like:

123.foo 456.bar 

and can reconnect with, eg, ‘screen -dr foo‘.

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Mini screen tutorial, incorporating the answer to this question:

Login in to server.com and do

screen -S foo  

and then never log out of that session again. To reconnect to it from elsewhere, do

ssh -t server.com screen -dr foo 

To list available screens to reconect to:

screen -ls 

or, of course,

ssh server.com screen -ls 

to check on server.com’s available screens remotely.

I now use the following alias (tcsh), based on Jason’s answer below, to connect to a named screen if it exists or create and connect otherwise:

alias ssc 'ssh -t \!:1 'screen -S \!:2 -dr || screen -S \!:2'' 

Answer 1

Does the -t option do what you want?

      -t      Force pseudo-tty allocation.  This can be used to execute arbi-              trary screen-based programs on a remote machine, which can be              very useful, e.g. when implementing menu services.  Multiple -t              options force tty allocation, even if ssh has no local tty. 

So:

laptop> ssh -t server.com screen -dr pts-2 

This seems to work in my installation.