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screen - how to detach a session from your window
22 February 1999
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| This article tells you how to install screen, "a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes (typically interactive shells)" [that quote shamelessly stolen from man screen]. |
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Why use screen?
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| If you are a dialup user, screen will allow you to save your session, hang up, and at a later time reconnect and restart your session. If you have only one phone line, that will allow to you make another phone call, save a running job, etc. I've already found it to be useful and I've only used it once so far! |
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Installing screen
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Here's how I installed screen. Remember, I already had the entire ports tree. You may have to refer to the FreeBSD Handbook to see how to install a port.# cd /usr/ports/misc/screen # make # make install |
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Using screen
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| To start a new screen session, just enter screen. Then start
what ever processes you want. To detach a screen session, type "^a
d" (that's "control-a" followed by a "d" for detach). The
session will then be put into the background. To reattach a session, type screen
-a. It's kind of hard to demonstrate this in written form, but I suggest you give it a try. Remember to read the man pages for screen! Also, you can create a screen session by typing something like this: screen -S top10 top 10 and it will give you a screen session running the top 10 command. And you can reattach to a session by typing screen -r which will give you a list of the screen sessions:
In the above, if you want to go back to the screen we started above, you would type: screen -r top10 See man screen for more details. |