Re: Screen Command vs. Virtual Consoles

[Mario Lang <mlang@teleweb.at>]

"John J. Boyer" <director@chpi.org> writes:

> Is there any advantage of using the screen command over using virtual
> consoles?

You can detach and later reattach to screen sessions. This allows
me to leave certain programs running, and reattach to their screen
instance when connecting later.

Imagine, your computer has a network connection reachable from the internet
say, via ssh. You login locally on your virtual terminal or whatever you use,
and start screen.  Then you open several screen windows, and start programs
in there, say, e.g. Emacs, a shell session, and a lynx session.
Now you have to leave your computer, you can either leave screen running, or
for safety, detach the session using C-a d.
Now you login into that machine from somewhere else, e.g. you went to work.
You can invoke screen -r or screen -dR to reattach to the detached session.
You get the same state as you detached it. See man screen for a description
of the various detach/reattach commands.

It is also possible to have screen as your login shell, basicly giving
you a simultaneous session for each login.  

Also, you can attach to a running screen session without detaching the
other terminal. Thats the option -x, and allows two
or more people on different terminals to work with the same programs.  I used
this technique for a Linux course for blind students to replace
overhead alike mechanisms. They simply all attached to my screen session.
This helped extremely much.
The method even worked the other way round, I configured their logins in such a way
so that they were in a screen session everytime.  So if someone had a problem,
I simply attached to his screen session, and could see what was on his screen
without having to move physically and disturb him by using his braille display.

Recently, I also discovered that you can use screen to attach to a 
pty, a pseudo terminal.  The only real world use currently I know of
is to connect to certain ptys created by User-mode-linux.

-- 
CYa,
  Mario