On 29/05/13 09:10, Lev Lafayette wrote:

* Malcolm Herbert, Introduction to GNU Screen

Malcolm has been hacking and playing with a range of Unix systems of different flavours since 1991 in a variety of environments. Over time he's encountered tools that manage to get the job done with a minimum of fuss and have incorporated these into the set that he use on a daily basis; screen is one such tool and is sometimes referred to as the Swiss Army chainsaw of the Unix world.

In a nutshell, screen is a terminal multiplexing tool. Rather than run multiple individual terminals on your local host (ie, PuTTY windows, Konsole tabs) for various tasks, screen allows a single local window to manage multiple instances of shells on the remote host. Configuration options allow maintenance of remote session state despite network interruption; multiple active heads; session logging; cut and paste; plus many others.

By the way, I encourage Malcolm and others to investigate "tmux". It's similar to screen, but offers extra features such as: * multiple clients/sessions can exist and be transferred between each other (ie. you can open a new window in one session; then attach a new client and simultaneously view that window, then even remove it from the first client) * free-form splitting of the virtual console * easier configuration and shortcuts, interactive menus * easier scripting of actions from the shell * multiple paste buffers * automatically renames window titles * selectable vi or emacs controls More details about how it differs at: http://sourceforge.net/p/tmux/tmux-code/ci/master/tree/FAQ