SCREEN Tip

[Austin Godber]

Looking at the pictures Alan just posted reminded me of a screen tip I 
wanted to share.


When I was working at the Mars Space Flight Facility there were a few 
computers I would constantly log into.  I like lots of desktops ( in a 
3x3 grid typically) and this results in a huge number of xterms.  For 
the first few months in such an interrupt driven environment I would 
constantly lose the xterm I had a root shell into machine A or my 
account on machine B.  Ultimately I ended up accumulating lots of root 
and other shells and they would be left around for days lost or worse, 
accidentally typed 'sudo reboot' on the DHCP server.

I was looking at the screen manpage one day when it occurred to me that 
it could be configured to auto-detach and be password protected.  So, I 
created a screenrc for each host, that would launch 2 root and 2 godber 
ssh connections to the remote machine and would auto-detach after just a 
few minutes of idle time.  I set up an alias to launch screen with the 
appropriate screenrc and a corresponding alias to reattach.

This meant that if I walked away from my desk, it would detach and 
password protect the screen.  Even better, when I returned to my desk I 
didn't need to find which of 37 xterms the connection was in, I simply 
reconnected in whatever xterm was handy and I picked up right where I 
left off.  Not only that, if I was REALLY in the middle of something and 
found my self on the other side of the building, I could SSH back to my 
desktop and reattach and type in that MAC address I had just looked up 
or whatever.

Just thought I would mention it since I found it tremendously useful.

Austin