A tribute to GNU Screen
Yeechang Lee
my own Linux box at home for over eight years now, and thought I knew
pretty much everything there is to know about such systems without
being a professional system administrator. I'd heard of GNU Screen off
and on, had a very vague idea of its benefits, and even tried it a
couple of times, but never got beyond noticing that the C-a prefix
obviously interfered with any sensible set of Emacs-like key bindings.
Thus it was all the more galling to really sit down and figure out how
to use and customize screen a few months ago (first changing the
escape keystroke to C-t, as I never use M-x transpose in emacs). What
a revelation! Had I known this existed in 1994, I wouldn't have
bothered with a buggy DOS TCP/IP socket driver so as to use MS
Kermit's support for multiple telnet clients. I wouldn't have had to,
until late last year, perform the log in/start emacs+slrn/quit
emacs+slrn/log out routine about twenty bazillion times while moving
between physical locations. It seriously irks me that knowing of
screen's benefits would have saved me a total of
. . . *two-and-one-quarter days* of my time over those many years!
Humor aside, to me screen is yet another example of:
* The sheer elegance of the Unix philosophy of small tools, each
designed for a specific task.
* The never-ending depths that Unix contains.
* The value of the free (beer and speech) software model.
Long live GNU Screen!
--
Read my Deep Thoughts @ <URL:http://www.ylee.org/blog/> PERTH ----> *
02:11:02 up 14 days, 4:21, 18 users, load average: 1.06, 1.25, 1.16
181 processes: 174 sleeping, 4 running, 3 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 31.6% user 6.6% system 61.6% nice 0.0% iowait 0.0% idle