linux.dsplabs.com.au

Linux has many useful tools and utilities. Remote shell manager called screen is certainly one of them. screen allows for remote persistent shell sessions that are immune to connection hangups. The manager has an extensive and powerful set of features. Once mastered, it becomes an essential tool.

Below is a screenshot of a screen session running top task monitor on a research cluster head-node, sunfire01. Notice how the screen status bar (at the bottom) shows that there are three shells currently running within the screen manager. Infact, one shell is local to the host running screen, i.e. sunfire01, and the other two are remote ssh shells on a processing node sunfire16. ©2007 dsplabs.com.au

It is possible to manually spawn new shells within the screen manager. It is also possible, and quite convenient, to specify default start-up shells in .screenrc configuration file. Here is a sample .screenrc file that accomplishes this. ©2007 dsplabs.com.au

# C-a :source .screenrc

termcapinfo xterm* ti@:te@
startup_message off
vbell off
autodetach on
altscreen on
shelltitle "$ |bash"
defscrollback 10000
defutf8 on
nonblock on
# ©2007 dsplabs.com.au
hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string '%{= kw}[ %{= kb}%H%{= kw} ][%= %{= kw}%?%-Lw%?%{= kW}%n*%f %t%?%?%{= kw}%?%
+Lw%?%?%= ][ %{r}%l%{w} ]%{w}[%{r} %d/%m/%y %C %A %{w}]%{w}'

bind 'q' quit

# syntax: screen -t label order command
screen -t sunfire01 0
screen -t sunfire16 2 ssh s1554463@sunfire16
screen -t sunfire16 1 ssh s1554463@sunfire16

Please note that WordPress replaces some default ASCII characters, such as f.e. quotes, to dress-up the posts. This can cause errors when copying commands from WordPress posts back into bash. For that reason a text file version of the .screenrc file is also provided.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 1:35 am and is filed under .screenrc, Tools, Configuration, Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.