What is Screen? | How to Use Screen Command in Linux | Attached and Detached Screen

How to Use screen command, attached and detached screen

Screen is a utility that give us a virtual terminals means its allow us to resume the session during we want to perform long-running task and suddenly connection drops or session terminated.

In simplicity we can say that screen utility allow as to attach and detch screen session during a long task without any lose of work.


To install Screen in Linux

We can easily install screen utility by "screen" package in Debian and CentOS/Rhel/Fedora

Ubuntu and Debian

sudo apt update

sudo apt install screen

CentOS/RHEL and Fedora

yum install screen

 

After Successfully Installed utility we can check all available option the the following command

To Help of Screen

screen -h

To start Screen

screen

It will open a new session in same terminal, we can get list of command by Press

Ctrl + A  together then press  ? 

We can check  screen session by -ls option

screen -ls

To start Screen with define screen name

screen -S myscreen

Here is xxxx.myscreen is defined with the help of -S option, both screen is attached mode.

In this example we open 2 screen session, first "4278.pts-0.lokesh" then open "4359.myscreen" both is Attached mode and ready for running a long-running task.

Now we will dettached  screen  so we can resume later.

To Detached screen

Press   Ctrl + a  then press  d 

It will give a display something like [detached from 4278.pts-0.lokesh]

To Resume Or Attached screen

screen -r <screen name>

screen -r pts-0.lokesh 

Below are some most  commands for managing Screen

Ctrl+a    c     Create a new window in screen
Ctrl+a    "     List all open windows
Ctrl+a    0     Switch to active windows by number 0...9
Ctrl+a    A    Rename the current window
Ctrl+a    S    Split current region horizontally into two regions
Ctrl+a    |     Split current region vertically into two regions
Ctrl+a    tab    Switch the input focus to the next region
Ctrl+a    Q    Close all regions but the current one
Ctrl+a    X    Close the current region

Thanks