Install Screen

Screen is a nice little utility that can enable you do install one thing in the background while doing something else. Install it by doing the following:


# cd /usr/ports/sysutils/screen
# make install clean

We will want to install this as installing the cvsup port takes a while to do. Type rehash and hit Enter. typing rehash just refreshes the terminal we are in IF you're using tcsh. We are going to now add a customization to screen so we don't get the welcome window. Copy /usr/local/share/examples/screen/screenrc to your home dir. We will always want to run screen as root so run the following command:


# cp /usr/local/share/examples/screen/screenrc ~root/.screenrc
# vi ~root/.screenrc

Remove the # in front of # startup_message off so it appears as startup_message off. Change vbell on to vbell off and put in a # in front of vbell_msg " Wuff ---- Wuff!! " so it appears as #vbell_msg " Wuff ---- Wuff!! "

What this will do is tell screen not to show the startup window. Now lets give it a test to get yourself familiar with it. Type rehash and hit Enter and then type screen and hit Enter. You'll notice the screen will flash and then you will be bumped back to a prompt again. You are now in a screen session. To disconnect from screen, hold down CTRL and then hit A and then D. You can let go of the CTRL key. You will see the words [detached].

Now that screen is running in the background, we can reattach to it by typing in screen -rd and hit Enter. If you have more than one screen running and you probably will as get you get more familiar with it, Just run ps -auxw | grep screen. This command will grep (or more simply find) any screen sessions and display their PID. To connect to a screen by PID, just type screen -r PID. Pretty easy eh? I would recommend running screen in this entire step as it is quite lengthy.