How to Use Screen on Linux to Detach and Reattach Your Terminal

 

Zubair Ahmed

 

4 min read

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Nov 5, 2020

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Why Screen?

screen is this awesome software tool in Linux that provides you the ability to spring-up and use multiple shell sessions from a single ssh session. Screen essentially acts as a terminal multiplexer emulator that is packed with features (just look at the size of its man page, you'll know 😝)

A few key benefits of screen are:

• Leverage the use of multiplexer to create multiple shell windows from a single shell SSH session
• Re-establish access and control of the shell session through network disruptions
• Ability to disconnect and re-connect to a shell session from any system
• Ability to daemonize a session to keep a long-running process and attach to the session whenever needed

Honestly, the above ☝ are just a few examples. There are many

How to Install It?

It is most likely already have screen installed on your system. To check if you already have it installed you can use the which command to inspect the path of screen on your system.

which screen
#output
/usr/bin/screen

If you don’t have screen, then you can easily install it using yum on CentOS

sudo yum install screen

or on Debian using apt like

sudo apt install screen

or on Manjaro using pacman like

sudo pacman -Sy screen

or on Fedora using dnf like

sudo dnf install screen

Once, you have successfully installed it you can check using the which command again. Alternatively, you can run the screen command

screen

It should prompt you a new window within the screen

How to Use It?

Using Sessions

To get started just use your command line and simply type as shown below:

screen

You’ll see a page of legal information. You can now press Space or Enter to go to the command prompt.

🤔 Hmmm, you seem to have returned to you your normal session and nothing seems to have happened. But surprise-surprise, you’re now running a shell inside your screen multiplexer emulator.

Let’s get testing by running a long-running script on the session. Let’s download some bug file

wget https://download.geofabrik.de/europe-latest.osm.pbf

Now our download will begin, and the progress will be display on the screen.

Now, we are going to detach from the session using Clrl+A and then press d.

now lets list out the screen windows using the -ls (list) option

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We are can use the -r (reattach) option and the number of the session to reattach to it

And just like that, you’re back working on your download. 😄

You can always exit from a screen session by just typing the exit command as you would do in a typical session.

exit

If you’re not comfortable using numbered sessions and would like some semantic name for them you can do use using the -S (session name) option.

screen -S bigassDownload

Appropriately our command to reattach will now be leveraging the name of the session that we had quite some creatively given

screen -r bigassDownload

Recap

• On the terminal, type screen
• Use Ctrl+a + d to detach from the screen session
• Reattach to screen session by typing screen -r <ID>
• Start a named session using screen -S <name>
• Reattach to a named screen session by typing screen -r <name>

Conclusion

My fellow coders, programmers, and wannabe hackers; we just learn how to use screen on Linux. Now you can start using the utility and go-crazy impressing people with your nifty terminal skills.

You can also personalize your screen utility by using a .screenrc file. To learn about the various customization options you can follow the Screen User's Manual.

Read more at Grizzlybit 🐻.