Linux Desktop Hacks

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Chapter 7, Terminal Empowerment

#49 Share Applications and Monitors with screen

HACK

Now press the control key combination Ctrl-A; then press D. You’ll be

returned to your original console with the following message:

[detached]

To see a list of your running screens, type:

foo@bar:~$ screen –ls

You’ll see something like this:

There is a screen on:

25091.pts-3.foo (Detached)

1 Socket in /var/run/screen/S-user.

Now you can reattach to your screen with:

foo@bar:~$ screen –r

If you’ve got multiple screens listed, you can select which one to connect to

with this:

foo@bar:~$ screen –r n

Here you should replace n with the number shown by screen –ls (e.g.,

25091), as shown earlier.

Mirror, Mirror

Another useful feature is the ability to attach to an already attached screen.

This is often used for rescuing an uncleanly detached session (e.g., your con-

nection dropped), but you also can use it to mirror applications.

IRC is a good example for this. People running several machines at once (e.g.,

laptop and desktop) might want to have their IRC channels open on both

machines, but don’t want to be signed in twice. With

screen you don’t have to!

From a shell, enter the following:

foo@bar:~$ screen irssi

This launches screen and loads irssi (a console IRC client) onto screen 0 (you

don’t always have to use an interactive shell).

From another shell (local, or remotely in an SSH shell), enter the following:

foo@bar:~$ ...