How to better handle long-running SSH sessions with Screen

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When you are working on a remote machine using SSH you may have faced that your connection was closed by the remote machine e.g. because you were inactive for a certain period of time. Because any operations that were still running in your SSH session will be stopped as well in such cases you may lose some work or progress. A solution for such problems is to use a window manager like Screen in your SSH session.

With Screen, you can create multiple full-screen terminal windows to which you can attach, and detach at any time. This allows keeping your progress (including previous terminal messages) also when your SSH session closes unexpectedly.

Screen Installation

sudo apt install screen

Screen Basics

You can create a new screen session with

screen

You can leave a screen session e.g. by pressing CTRL+D (to terminate the session), or CTRL+A+D to detach from the screen session while it continues to run in the background.

To list all running screen sessions you can execute

screen -ls

To start a new session with a name you can do this as follows.

screen -S name

To re-attach to a screen session, you can use the id of the session or the name if you assigned one with the following command.

screen -r name

These are the basics of using Screen. If you are interested in more details, you can find the here.

Thanks for reading.

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