Comments on: useful screen bash function

By: nigel kersten

nigel kersten — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 20:59:55 +0000

I actually fixed up the formatting, so it should look ok now?

I quite like the way you’ve done that…. installing dialog via MacPorts now to check it out.

By: Joe McDonagh

Joe McDonagh — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 19:47:47 +0000

Formatting’s all destroyed above, sorry. I’ll post it on my blog in the right format

By: Joe McDonagh

Joe McDonagh — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 19:47:08 +0000

I have a little function that draws a menu of screen sessions, it uses a known non-portable switch for dialog (--stdout) but works nicely on my leenuckz box. I don't have a mac to test it:

#!/bin/bash
CHOICE=`dialog --stdout \
               --menu "Screen Sessions" 0 0 0 \
               $(screen -ls \
                 | sed -e 1d -e '$d' \
                 | sed '$d' \
                 | tr -d '(' \
                 | awk '{ print $1" "$2 }')`

screen -x $CHOICE

By: nigel kersten

nigel kersten — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 15:16:07 +0000

I’ve been trying to think why I like having multiple screen instances, and my only conclusion is that I’m used to it. I do use screen -x sometimes, but not consistently.

I do also have different profiles set up due to some internal tools I use requiring different keyboard layouts, backspace/delete, term emulators, etc etc, so I guess that’s part of it. I could just try and work out a unified profile…

By: charlie

charlie — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:16:22 +0000

Yet another nifty function using screen (kind of plaything):

Screensaver as desktop background

http://codesnippets.joyent.com/posts/show/1508

By: dre

dre — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 02:42:52 +0000

Maybe I’m missing something, but what’s the rationale between using multiple instances of screen, given that you can attach to a single instance as many times as needed (from different terminals / hosts / whatever) using screen -x? Each simultaneous attached client can discretely switch between screen windows…

By: nigel kersten

nigel kersten — Thu, 15 May 2008 13:11:52 +0000

my normal rule with bash is if I’m using arrays, I should rewrite it in something else…

After you explained your setup yesterday, I spent a while trying to use it, but just couldn’t seem to get myself to work like that…

I never used to need to work out which session to reattach to, but since starting with a 30″ monitor attached to my laptop at work, I seem to lose the visual link between sessions when attaching/detaching the monitor and/or network.

Are you still just living in one single terminal instance and doing absolutely everything in screen? That might be the difference… I like having 5 specific terminal windows that have differing screen sessions.

By: Jeff McCune

Jeff McCune — Thu, 15 May 2008 12:50:20 +0000

I certainly don’t claim any semblance of betterness, however I’ve never found the need to sort out which screen session to re-attach to.

My fundamental assumption is that there’s one screen session to rule them all. I call it TRUNK, and it’s bound to ^v rather than ^a.

So, I fire up the main screen session with screen -S TRUNK -e ^vV, and then sub-screen sessions are created inside, like screen -S DEV, screen -S SSH, etc…

So, even though lots of screens are running, I only need to do a screen -rx TRUNK to pick up right where I left off. I also find it nice to be able to attach multiple terminal windows to the same “trunk” screen session, but viewing different nested screens, e.g. SSH or DEV. This also effectively allows copying and pasting of text across different ssh endpoints.

Definitely a cool bash function though. Particularly good example of array use in shell scripts.