I got so excited about the screen program that I set up this blog just so I could write about it. When I ssh to one of our servers I often end up su-ing between various users to perform actions that need to be invoked with different privileges. That can get pretty tedious. I could set up sudo for this, but I’d rather have dedicated sessions than constantly have to prefix my commands with ’sudo’. I finally decided to learn how to use screen which is a sort of window manager for console sessions.
Screen allows you to:
- create a number of consoles and switch between them with keyboard shortcuts
- detach from a session and re-attach to it later, even from a different machine!
- share the same session simultaneously with others — this could be very useful for learning administrative tasks by going through them together
- split the window so multiple consoles are visible at the same time
Here are a few brief tutorials on using it:
