I got tired a long time ago of losing what I was currently working on in SSH sessions when they were lost due to disconnects from network connectivity issues. To combat this I have been using screen when running sessions that I can absolutely not lose, but the problem still persists in other sessions or when I forgot to run it. The easy solution to this was to add screen to one of my bash init scripts (~/.bashrc [or ~/.bash_profile]) as follows:
alias autoscreen="screen -x -RR && exit"
if [[ "$TERM" == cygwin* || "$TERM" == xterm* ]]; then autoscreen; fi
This automatically makes the
screen command run on bash user initialization, always connecting to the same session.
Edit on 2012-12-17 @ 7:00pm:
The last iteration was:
if [ $TERM == "xterm" ]; then screen -R pts-0.`hostname` && exit; fi
- The main screen command is now an “alias” to help out with some bash parsing problems.
- The resume parameters are now “-x -RR” which first attempts to multiplex a session, and if that fails, it creates a session. With multiplexing turned on, everyone uses the same screen session and can interact with each other, and you don’t have to worry about accidentally connecting to the wrong screen session or having new ones turned on. The only problem is sometimes you may accidentally step on other user’s toes :-)
- The special screen session name was removed so it always starts with the default name (easier to manually interact with)
- I added detection of multiple term names (cygwin and xterm), and added a wildcard at the end of each since there is often suffixes to these names. More term names can easily be added using this syntax.
Edit on 2010-12-30 @ 3:50am: I changed != "screen" to == "xterm" because otherwise scp and some other non-term programs were failing. You may have to use something other than “xterm” for your systems.
Edit on 2010-1-24 @ 2:00pm: I added the exit; so the terminal automatically exits when the screen session closes.
