Screen

Basics

screen usually does not exist. This is the committee's general position on screen due to the disastrous and/or hilarious situations which often result from new members' attempts to get it working. However, for the purpose of this tutorial, screen does exist, and this is how you use it. (Blame coconut for this defiance.)

Omg, what's screen?

screen is most commonly known as "that thing that lets you stay logged in to chat when you log out of RedBrick". It's a terminal multiplexer, which allows you to log into multiple terminal sessions from one terminal window and keeps them open when you go away to bed or whatever it is you do with your time.

Opening

Type the following at the prompt:

 screen

This will open a new screen session.

Creating windows

When you start screen, it presents you with one default window.

ctrl + a c

This keybinding will open a new window (window 2) inside screen.

Switching windows

If you have more than one window open, you can switch between them using.

ctrl + a + a

or using

ctrl + a + window_number

or using

ctrl + a + n
ctrl + a + p

to go forward, or back.

Detaching screen

The beauty of screen is that it can remain running when you are logged out, therefore allowing you to run time consuming processes in the background. Dettach using

ctrl + a + d

Reattaching screen

To reattach an allready detached screen, use.

screen -d -r

The -d will dettach any "attached" screens and -r will reattach your screen.

Note that if you have more than one screen session available, you will need to specify the screen id you wish to open.

Killing screen

Often enough new members (and people like goldfish) will make mistakes with screen. To kill screen altogether and start over

ctrl + a + \

More commands

A long list of screen commands can be found here: http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/linux/cmd/cmd.csp?path=s/screen