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Screen

The Linux program screen is a powerful terminal multiplexer. It allows you to create and manage multiple terminal sessions within a single window. Key features include:

  • Creating multiple windows: You can open multiple terminal sessions within screen, each running a different program or command.
  • Detaching and reattaching: You can detach from a screen session and reattach to it later, even from a different location. This is useful for long-running processes that you don’t want to interrupt.
  • Session persistence: Even if your SSH connection drops, the processes running within screen will continue to run.
  • Window management: screen provides commands to switch between windows, create new ones, kill existing ones, and more.

In essence, screen enhances your terminal workflow by providing session management, persistence, and multitasking capabilities.

Commands

screen -S <sessionname>

Starts a new named screen session. This is very useful for managing multiple sessions. For example: screen -S mywork.

Short keys

Ctrl + a – d

Detach from the current session

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