"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