Copyright © 1993-2018 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the Foundation.
[ << ] | [ < ] | [ Up ] | [ > ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
1 Overview | Preliminary information. | |
2 Getting Started | An introduction to screen .
| |
3 Invoking Screen | Command line options for screen .
| |
4 Customizing Screen | The ‘.screenrc’ file. | |
5 Commands | List all of the commands. | |
6 New Window | Running a program in a new window. | |
7 Selecting a Window | Selecting a window to display. | |
8 Session Management Commands | Suspend/detach, grant access, connect sessions. | |
9 Regions | Split-screen commands. | |
10 Window Settings | Titles, logging, etc. | |
11 Virtual Terminal | Controlling the screen VT100 emulation.
| |
12 Copy and Paste | Exchanging text between windows and sessions. | |
13 Subprocess Execution | I/O filtering with exec .
| |
14 Key Binding | Binding commands to keys. | |
15 Flow Control | Trap or pass flow control characters. | |
16 Termcap | Tweaking your terminal’s termcap entry. | |
17 The Message Line | The screen message line.
| |
18 Logging | Keeping a record of your session. | |
19 Startup | Functions only useful at screen startup.
| |
20 Miscellaneous commands | Various other commands. | |
21 String Escapes | Inserting current information into strings | |
22 Environment Variables | Environment variables used by screen .
| |
23 Files Referenced | Files used by screen .
| |
24 Credits | Who’s who of screen .
| |
25 Bugs | What to do if you find a bug. | |
26 Installation | Getting screen running on your system.
| |
Concept Index | Index of concepts. | |
Command Index | Index of all screen commands.
| |
Keystroke Index | Index of default key bindings. |
Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells. Each virtual terminal provides the functions of the DEC VT100 terminal and, in addition, several control functions from the ISO 6429 (ECMA 48, ANSI X3.64) and ISO 2022 standards (e.g. insert/delete line and support for multiple character sets). There is a scrollback history buffer for each virtual terminal and a copy-and-paste mechanism that allows the user to move text regions between windows.
When screen
is called, it creates a single window with a shell in
it (or the specified command) and then gets out of your way so that you
can use the program as you normally would. Then, at any time, you can
create new (full-screen) windows with other programs in them (including
more shells), kill the current window, view a list of the active
windows, turn output logging on and off, copy text between windows, view
the scrollback history, switch between windows, etc. All windows run
their programs completely independent of each other. Programs continue
to run when their window is currently not visible and even when the
whole screen session is detached from the user’s terminal.
When a program terminates, screen
(per default) kills the window
that contained it. If this window was in the foreground, the display
switches to the previously displayed window; if none are left,
screen
exits. Shells usually distinguish between running as login-shell or sub-shell.
Screen runs them as sub-shells, unless told otherwise (See shell
.screenrc command).
Everything you type is sent to the program running in the current window. The only exception to this is the one keystroke that is used to initiate a command to the window manager. By default, each command begins with a control-a (abbreviated C-a from now on), and is followed by one other keystroke. The command character (see section Command Character) and all the key bindings (see section Key Binding) can be fully customized to be anything you like, though they are always two characters in length.
Screen
does not understand the prefix C- to mean control, although
this notation is used in this manual for readability.
Please use the caret notation (^A instead of C-a) as arguments
to e.g. the escape
command or the -e
option. Screen
will also print out control characters in caret notation.
The standard way to create a new window is to type C-a c. This creates a new window running a shell and switches to that window immediately, regardless of the state of the process running in the current window. Similarly, you can create a new window with a custom command in it by first binding the command to a keystroke (in your ‘.screenrc’ file or at the C-a : command line) and then using it just like the C-a c command. In addition, new windows can be created by running a command like:
screen emacs prog.c
from a shell prompt within a previously created window. This will not
run another copy of screen
, but will instead supply the command
name and its arguments to the window manager (specified in the $STY environment
variable) who will use it to create the new window. The above example would
start the emacs
editor (editing ‘prog.c’) and switch to its window.
- Note that you cannot transport environment variables from
the invoking shell to the application (emacs in this case), because it is
forked from the parent screen process, not from the invoking shell.
If ‘/etc/utmp’ is writable by screen
, an appropriate record
will be written to this file for each window, and removed when the
window is closed. This is useful for working with talk
,
script
, shutdown
, rsend
, sccs
and other
similar programs that use the utmp file to determine who you are. As
long as screen
is active on your terminal, the terminal’s own
record is removed from the utmp file. See section Login.
[ << ] | [ < ] | [ Up ] | [ > ] | [ >> ] |
This document was generated on March 11, 2020 using texi2html 5.0.