As an administrator or unix user who has just SSH’d into a remote server, have you had the requirement to open multiple remote terminals without having to resort to re-logging in multiple times? I’ve had this one too many times, where I needed to run multiple apps, view logs etc. etc. in separate terminals, which can be made easy using GNU Screen.
GNU Screen is a screen multiplexer, which can be installed via a simple apt-get install screen on your linux server. This should be available by default as well. Once that is done, the following steps should suffice
- Login to your remote terminal (e.g: via SSH)
- Open Screen
user@remote> screen
- Use the following commands to create, navigate etc. CTRL+A (CTRL A) is the control key in my Ubuntu server by default, and this might be the case for you as well. Thus when I refer to CTRL A p, I mean holding CTRL + A down, press the ‘p’ key
- Create a new terminal:
user@remote> CTRL A c
- Move to the next terminal:
user@remote> CTRL A n
- Move to the previous terminal:
user@remote> CTRL A p
Etc. Some more commands are as follows
- Move to a specific terminal: CTRL A “
- Move to the last used terminal: CTRL A A
- Move to terminal number 0 (0-9) : CTRL A 0
These commands were enough to get me going. For even further commands and to explore the power of screen in depth, here are some useful resources:
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