I am an avid fan of the Linux utility screen. It allows you to have multiple ‘screenlets’ inside of one command line session on a server, swapping between them as you wish. On top of that, if you get disconnected from your server because you have to do some admin work from a hotel room with a poor internet connection, the screen will keep whatever work you were doing on your server chugging along. If you need to fire up some long running process, but you don’t want to stay SSH’d into your remote server the entire time, screen will also let you ‘detach’ from it, leaving the command running, while you go off to Olive Garden to grab a bite to eat.

I’m not going to go into all the details of how to work screen… instead, I am going to cover what I use in 90% of my interactions with it, which is a surprisingly small list! First, we are going to get it all set up to give you a nicely configured screen session with a few screenlets in it. We can do this by placing a file called .screenrc inside of your home folder. Here are the contents of my .screenrc:

shelltitle ''
vbell on
autodetach on
startup_message off
defscrollback 2048
termcapinfo xterm* ti@:te@

hardstatus alwayslastline "%-Lw%{= BW}%50>%n%f* %t%{-}%+Lw%< %=%D %M %d %c" hardstatus string '%{= kK}%-Lw%{= KW}%50>%n%f %t%{= kK}%+Lw%< %{=kG}%-= %d%M %c:%s%{-}'

screen -t r00t 0 bash
screen -t vimTerm 1 bash
screen -t general 2 bash

I can’t take complete credit for that .screenrc. The hardstatus line I pulled off the internet somewhere 😉

It works out really well, it gives a nice bar at the bottom which shows all of your screenlets and highlights whichever one you are now on. It also keeps a clock in the bottom right corner, and will flash the title of a screenlet if a ‘bell’ go’s off in it.

Now that we have a good screenrc, you can fire up screen by running the command ‘screen’ (you may need to install screen from your distributions repository). But we can take this one step further and have your system fire up screen automatically when you SSH into the server by adding a little snippet of code at the end of your .bashrc:

if [ $SSH_TTY ] && [ ! $WINDOW ]; then
  SCREENLIST=`screen -ls | grep 'Attached'`
  if [ $? -eq "0" ]; then
    echo -e "Screen is already running and attached:\n ${SCREENLIST}"
  else
    screen -U -R
  fi
fi

That will fire up a screen session when you SSH in unless someone is already attached to your user accounts screen session. Now that we have screen configured, and we have your server starting it up automatically when you log in, lets learn how to use it!

If you are using the .screenrc that I provided above, you will notice the 3 screenlet’s titles at the bottom (r00t, vimTerm and general). You can adjust those names by editing the .screenrc. In order to swap between different screenlets use the keystrokes Ctrl+a NUMBER. The number will be whatever number of screenlet you want to go to, so if you want to go to screenlet 1, it would be ‘Ctrl+a 1’.

If you want to detach from your screen, leaving everything running, and enabling you to disconnect from the server, use the keystrokes Ctrl+a d.

If you log into the server and you get a message saying that ‘Screen is already running and attached’ you can detach screen from the other location and attach it to you current SSH session with the command ‘screen -D -RR’. That command will do whatever is necessary to get you a screen session… detaching other sessions and attaching, starting a new session, attaching to a detached session etc.