Smokes your problems, coughs fresh air.
The world is filled with stupid routers, which kill all connections that have no activity for a while (even a very short while). I keep loosing my SSH sessions because of this. To fix it, I added a clock in my GNU screen bar:
hardstatus alwayslastline "%= %H | %l | [%c:%s]"
For the record, my entire .screenrc:
multiuser on caption always "%{= kB}%-Lw%{=s kB}%50>%n%f* %t %{-}%+Lw%<" vbell off startup_message off term linux hardstatus alwayslastline "%= %H | %l | [%c:%s]"
To get the console of your Linux guests on a Xen machine, type “xm console
On every machine that I install, I need a custom environment. At the very basic, I need screen and bash customizations. I will attempt to keep this blog post up-to-date with my most recent config.
/etc/bash.bashrc_halfgaar (naming scheme depends on distro):
prompt_command { XTERM_TITLE="\e]2;\u@\H:\w\a" BGJOBS_COLOR="\[\e[1;30m\]" BGJOBS="" [ "$(jobs | head -c1)" ]; BGJOBS=" $BGJOBS_COLOR(bg:\j)"; DOLLAR_COLOR="\[\e[1;32m\]" [[ ${EUID} == 0 ]] ; DOLLAR_COLOR="\[\e[1;31m\]"; DOLLAR="$DOLLAR_COLOR\\\$" USER_COLOR="\[\e[1;32m\]" [[ ${EUID} == 0 ]]; USER_COLOR="\[\e[41;1;32m\]"; PS1="$XTERM_TITLE$USER_COLOR\u\[\e[1;32m\]@\H:\[\e[m\] \[\e[1;34m\]\w\[\e[m\]\n\ $DOLLAR$BGJOBS \[\e[m\]" } PROMPT_COMMAND=prompt_command EDITOR=vim ls='ls --color=auto' ll='ls -l' lh='ls -lh' grep='grep --color=auto'
Don’t forget to source the file in ~/.bashrc
~/.screenrc:
caption always "%{= kB}%-Lw%{=s kB}%50>%n%f* %t %{-}%+Lw%<"
vbell off
startup_message off
term linux
GNU Screen is great. So great that I find myself always using it. (Pressing the Window key and T launches an XTerm with a new Screen ready on my system, while I have to add Shift if I don’t want the screen.) This means that when I login into a some other machine through SSH—an occasion for which Screen is particularly useful—I will often end up with nested screens. So which Screen will receive my Ctrl+a presses?
The answer (courtesy of Google and Yacin Nadji) is that Ctrl+a will target the outer screen. Each a that you add after that will go down one nesting level.
Not that I don’t still find controlling nested screen confusing, but now at least I don’t feel helpless and stuck whenever it happens. 😉
Visible captions make it easier:
GNU Screen within Screen with captions
(If you don’t know how to configure Screen with captions, I’ve blogged about his previously.)
XTerm is my favorite terminal emulator and I love GNU Screen. So, imagine my joy when I found out that Screen can persistently show window captions ([Ctrl+A]: caption always
).
Now I wouldn’t loose track of my windows so easily. No more detours through the Window-list, and it gets better; from the Screen manual, I learned that I could set the caption to a string. Look what [Ctrl+A]: caption '%w'
does:
Cool! I could finally have my XTerm tabs. 🙂 Just recently, I was telling Wiebe—in reply to a complaint of him about getting lost in Screen’s window list—how cool it would be if you could have a terminal emulator display a tab for each screen window. Now I can tell him, instead, that tabs in a terminal emulator are a superfluous feature.
This last example is done with the following Screen command: caption always "%{= kB}%-Lw%{=s kB}%50>%n%f* %t %{-}%+Lw%<"
There are more examples in the manual page. Enjoy your tabs!
I like pair programming. So much, in fact, that I want to do it even if I can’t look over the other person’s shoulder due to some geographical offset. Since I’m a real command-line freak, I can get what I want easily by using GNU Screen.
If you don’t know GNU screen yet and you ever find yourself using the command-line for an extended period of time, learn it. Now. I’ll name just a few advantages:
Starting GNU Screen is very easy. Just type screen
at your shell prompt (or screen -S SESSION_NAME
if you want your session to have an easy-to-remember name).
Press CTRL+A followed by d to detach. Exit your terminal. Start a new terminal, type screen -r
and be amazed that you have your session back. screen -r
can take as an argument the name or PID of the screen, which is useful if you have more than one screen running. To get a list of current screen sessions, type screen -ls
.
The first thing you have to do is to add the following command to your .screenrc file:
multiuser on
If you don’t want to enable multiuser by default, you can also choose to type the command from within Screen each time that you need it. This is done by pressing Ctrl+A, followed by : and the command.
Myself, I prefer to have the command in my .screenrc. You need to admit users explicitly anyway. Admitting full access to a user is done by typing the :acladd USERNAME
command (after pressing Ctrl+A). Then the given user can join this session by starting screen with screen -x SESSION_OWNER/
where SESSION_OWNER is the driver.
The :acladd USERNAME
command will give the observer full read-write access. Maybe, if you have to deal with an observer who insists on taking the driver seat, you want to limit his or her access to read-only. This can be done just as easily: press Ctrl+A; then type :aclchg USERNAME -w "#"
.
Using a shared screen, it can be kind of annoying if your terminal sizes don’t match. As an observer, I fix this by asking the driver to tell me the values of the $ROWS and $COLS environment variables. If then, for example $COLS=110 and $ROWS=40, I start my xterm with this in mind: xterm -geometry 110x40
I’ve only touched upon some of the things you can do with screen. The manual page contains much more information—perhaps a bit too much even. 😕
One of the things I also like to do with a shared screen session is remote system administration. If I want to perform delicate tasks as root, I find it kind of comforting if someone can stop me in time, before I do anything stupid. Besides, if you’re both root, you don’t even have to set permissions. 🙂 So, it’s easy to.
© 2025 BigSmoke
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
Recent Comments