Question

Is there a way to get screen to echo back the session id when it creates a new window?

I am working on script in perl and I need screen to return the session id or the PID to me so I record it in an array or a hash.

Answer 1

What is your purpose for gathering these pids? It can be a little tricky in perl. Something like Unix::PID might help ( http://metacpan.org/pod/Unix::PID ) but I have the suspicion that your question does not address the actual problem you are trying to solve.

Since you are using screen -dmS <somename> you can do this:

my %screens;

for( $i = 0; $i < 10; $i++) {
  system("screen -dmS server$i");
}

open(my $fh, "screen -list|");
while (<$fh>){
  if (/Detached/) {
    /\s*(\d*)\.(.*?)\s/;
    my ($pid, $name) = ($1, $2);
    $screens{$name} = $pid;
  }
};