Screen Cheet Sheet

first thing's first:

man screen

• A good essay on screen usage
• Good info on multiuser screen

Do you have cool screen tricks?

move control-a to control-w with an alias, in bash, like this:

alias screen='screen -e ^Wa'

why would i want to do that? control-a means beginning of line by default. If you make screen's mate control-a you not longer have a "beginning of line" control sequence.

• good external page with some info here [1]

How to do other cool stuff?

• windows names and titles

screen -S "myscreename"

show up when you

screen -l

• cool hardstatus lines, in your .screenrc file:

hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string "%{gk}[ %{G}%H %{g}][%= %{wk}%?%-Lw%?%{r}(%{W}%n*%f %t%?(%u)%?%{r})%{w}%?%+Lw%?%?%= %{g}][%{B} %m/%d %{W}%c %{g}]"

• scroll back, in your .screenrc file:

termcapinfo xterm 'bc@:bs@'

useful key sequences

• meta-escape - pageup, pagedn to scroll back in the screen buffer ( you can use arrow keys and page up page down to scroll around)
• meta-space - next window
• meta-backspace - backwards through windows.
• meta-meta - previous window
• meta-A - allows you to rename a screen (if you can find a way to rename screens dynamically based on hostname, post it here for a chance to win a mars bar!)
• meta-" - allows you to select a screen by name.
• meta-' - allows you to select a screen by number.

Screen and ssh-agent2

This process will only work with ssh-agent forwarding.

Make sure you have a screenrc file in your home directory. If not copy the default.

cp /etc/screenrc ~/.screenrc

Now add the following line to ~/.screenrc and make sure ~/tmp exist.

setenv SSH2_AUTH_SOCK $HOME/tmp/socket

Next step is to add the following to .bashrc

if [ -S $HOME/tmp/socket ]; then
        echo "ssh-agent2 socket already exist"
else
        /bin/rm $HOME/tmp/socket
        ln -s $SSH2_AUTH_SOCK $HOME/tmp/socket
fi