Managing Screen Sessions on Linux Systems

Introduction to Screen Sessions

Screen is a powerful utility in Linux that allows users to create and manage multiple terminal sessions from a single console. It provides features like detaching and reattaching sessions, which makes it ideal for running long-running commands or experiments without being tied to the console.

Listing Running Screen Sessions

To list all running screen sessions, you can use the screen -ls command. This will display a list of detached screens with their corresponding session IDs.

Example:

$ screen -ls
There are screens on:
	12931.pts-0.gentle	(Detached)
	6764.pts-1.v1091330	(Detached)
2 Sockets in /var/run/screen/S-josh.

In this example, we have two detached screen sessions with IDs 12931.pts-0.gentle and 6764.pts-1.v1091330.

Attaching to a Running Screen Session

To attach to a running screen session, you can use the screen -x command followed by the session ID.

Example:

$ screen -x 12931.pts-0.gentle

This will reattach you to the screen session with the specified ID.

Detaching from a Screen Session

To detach from a screen session without terminating it, press Ctrl + A followed by D. This will leave the session running in the background.

Terminating a Screen Session

To terminate a screen session, press Ctrl + D while attached to the session. Alternatively, you can use the killall screen command to terminate all running screen sessions.

Tips and Variations

To create a new screen session, simply type screen.
You can set a custom title for your screen session using the -t option, e.g., screen -t mysession.
To list all screen sessions on a system, including those owned by other users, you can use the ls -laR /var/run/screen/ command.
If you want to identify a screen session by its name (set with the -t option), you can use a script like ps auxw|grep -i screen|grep -v grep.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we covered the basics of managing screen sessions on Linux systems. By using the screen -ls command to list running sessions and the screen -x command to attach to them, you can easily manage multiple terminal sessions from a single console.