Cheat Sheet: Screen

The screen command is a used to launch and arrange multiple terminal shells within a single shell.

It is mainly used for two purposes:

It can be used to run long-running commands on remote servers.
It can be used to organise multiple shells and allow you to navigate between them.

Commands

All screen commands need to be prefixed by an escape key, which is Ctrl-a by default.


Command	Category	Description
`screen`	Basic	Starts a new session
`screen -S <session_name>`	Basic	Starts a new session with session name
`screen -ls`	Basic	Lists running screen sessions
`screen -r <session_name>`	Basic	Attach to a running session with name
`screen -d <session_name>`	Basic	Detach a running session with name
`screen -r -d <session_name>`	Basic	Attach to a screen that is already attached
`Ctrl-a d`	Exiting	Detach
`Ctrl-a D D`	Exiting	Detach and logout (fast way to exit screen)
`Ctrl-a :`	Exiting	Quit and exits all of the programs in screen
`Ctrl-a esc`	Scrolling	Enter scrolling mode
`Ctrl-u`	Scrolling	Scroll Up
`Ctrl-d`	Scrolling	Scroll Down
`esc esc`	Scrolling	Exit scrolling mode
`Ctrl-a c`	Window Management	Create new window
`Ctrl-a Ctrl-a`	Window Management	Change to last-visited active window
`Ctrl-a <number>`	Window Management	Change to window by number (only 0-9)
`Ctrl-a ' <number_or_name>`	Window Management	Change to window by number or name
`Ctrl-a n`	Window Management	Change to next window in list
`Ctrl-a p`	Window Management	Change to previous window in list
`Ctrl-a "`	Window Management	Displays list of windows, allowing to select window to change into
`Ctrl-a A`	Window Management	Rename current window
`Ctrl-a k`	Window Management	Kill current window
`Ctrl-a \`	Window Management	Kill all windows
`Ctrl-a a`	Misc	Send Ctrl-A to screen within screen, useful when working with screen within screen

Posted on September 06, 2021

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Helpful Linux commands

So this is just going to be a bit of knowledge dump of things I’ve picked up lately / don’t want to forget.

Bang Cash !$

If you are intending on running a few commands with the last argument of the command being the same this can be really helpful. For example:

ping 127.0.0.1
netmap !$
traceroute !$

Alternatively you can also do !* to use all the arguments of the previous command.

sudo !!

This one is pretty simple sudo !! takes the last command and re-runs with sudo.

Screen

screen is a great feature that allows you to do any of the following; – Use multiple shells in a single SSH session. – Run a long running process without maintaining an active shell or worrying about network disruptions. – Disconnect and re-connect to a shell from multiple locations.

Using it is very simple, to start it you just use the command screen, from this point you are now inside of a window within screen.

Using screen requires remembering a few more commands (or noting them down in a blog post or something).

Start screen:

screen

To start a screen with a name, you can do the following screen -S 'name'

Create another window:

Ctrl-a c

Next window:

Ctrl-a n

Previous window:

Ctrl-a p

Detach window:

Ctrl-a d

This will detach your window and return you to your bash shell.

Re-attach screen:

screen -r If you have multiple screens, this will display a list of them and you will have to use the name of the screen as a third parameter to reattach to it.

Searching through previous commands

So as you may know you can use Control + R on Linux to search through previous commands you’ve entered in the terminal. You can with a few modifications of your ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile improve what is stored in the ~/.bash_history file, making this feature even more useful for remembering previous commands.

Ignore certain commands:

HISTIGNORE="pwd:df:du:cd:ls"

Increase how many commands are stored:

HISTFILESIZE=10000 (the default on most systems is 500)

Don’t save duplicate commands:

HISTCONTROL=ignoredups

Posted on January 14, 2018

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