What is GNU Screen?
Share
Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
What is GNU Screen? Great!
Erm, a slightly more useful answer: it allows you to run multiple console applications, or commands, in one terminal. Kind of like a tabbed terminal emulator. In fact, that’s exactly what it is (just not done with the regular GUI toolkits)
Why is it so great? Simple, you can run a program in a screen session (Run
screenand it runs your default shell, runscreen myappand it runs myapp in the session), hit ctrl+a (the screen control sequence) and then press d (ctrl+a,d) to detach.The program keeps running in the background, but, unlike doing
mycmd &, you can runscreen -rto reattach the session, and everything is as you left it. You can send input to the command, if it’s a curses UI, everything still works just like if it were a ‘real’ terminal.It’s very popular with console IRC clients – you can run (say)
screen irssiand reattach the session from anywhere you can SSH from.A few useful commands:
A few other useful things I’ve stumbled across:
-Uflag when you launch screen so it supports Unicode (for example,screen -xU)-xflag allows you to reattach the same session multiple times. (-rdisconnects existing connections)[ hostname ][ 0-$ bash (1*$ irssi) ][16/09 9:32](Running on hostname, it has two windows. This is set by the hardstatus lines in my .screenrc (at the end of the answer)