A comprehensive overview of Gnu Screen, how it works and what to do with it!

I wrote this Gnu Screen guide in December '08 with the previous incarnation of linux.com in mind. January 2009 however, linux.com started on its new and exciting path as a community site and the article just sat on my machine, waiting. So I decided to publish it on my blog in a five part series over the following month. Maybe someone can use it ;)

Have you ever had to run a time consuming process (say mkfs or compiling something) over a shoddy ssh connection? Or cleanly run several commands in parallel without having several open connections to that server? Or maybe you were programming and wanted a mysql prompt, a bash prompt and several text editors open? How about that ssh tunnel you need open and dont want to close by accident? And did you ever need to perform the same task on several different machines? Or connect to a serial terminal? Or maybe you just want a log file of what you re doing..
These are day to day situations any linux user will run into, that can be quite frustrating. That is, before you discover Gnu screen!

"Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells." Or at least, thats what the site calls it. Sounds easy enough, but there are an amazing amount of different uses for this incredible piece of software. The above list is some of the uses I could readily think about - some of the ways I regularly use screen, but like any decent linux tool - the sky really is the limit! I'll be looking into different issues, so lets jump into some of the practical solutions for those problems.

The articles in this series focus on the following topics..

• The Simple stuff
  • Slightly more advanced stuff
• The fun stuff
  • Command Parameter, Multi display mode, Copy Mode
  • Nethack, Different screen windows, Sending commands to all screen windows
  • Different regions, Logging, Screen Window Types
  • the .screenrc

And as versatile as screen is, there are always people doing interesting things with it. Check out the following tricks by other people!

• GNU Screen: open new window with same working directory: A shell function to open a new window in screen which is automatically in the same directory as where you call that function. (By Pascal Bleser, /dev/loki)
• GNU Screen: Working with the Scrollback Buffer By Chris Pettitt