Monthly Archives: June 2019

Basic Linux Screen Usage

Have you ever faced the situation where you perform a long-running task on a remote machine and suddenly your connection drops, the SSH session is terminated and your work is lost. Well, it has happened to all of us at some point, hasn’t it? Luckily, there is a utility called screen that allows us to resume the sessions.

Screen or GNU Screen is a terminal multiplexer. In other words, it means that you can start a screen session and then open any number of windows (virtual terminals) inside that session. Processes running in Screen will continue to run when their window is not visible even if you get disconnected.

Below are the most basic steps for getting started with screen:

1. At the command prompt, type screen.
2. Run the desired program.
3. Use the key sequence Ctrl-a + d to detach from the screen session.
4. Reattach to the screen session by typing screen -r.