Screen gems

So there's this *nix tool called "screen" that I know has been around a long time and I've seen it before and in use... but never used myself. I never really felt like I had a compelling reason to use it until this week. Now I wish I had added it to my tools arsenal long ago. It's just really handy. It basically just lets you run multiple shell sessions in the same window, BUT with the ability to detach them and re-attach them elsewhere. Now that's handy. I can run some stuff at home, detach the screen and resume it at work with history and output text and all. The multi-session lets me have fewer ssh windows up as well. At the office I just use kterm which has tabs and I keep multiple (maybe too many) windows up. No real need for screen there. But when remotely logged in, it's just that useful.

Then I thought, back when I was doing a lot of remote work before on a previous Linux box, how come I never used it? I guess it's the nature of the work. Back in grad school (ugh, I keep saying that) I did actual developing on my laptop, which I would rsync back to my workstation. In this instance, I can't really do that since I'm not developing (much) and what I do requires running through many gigs of data that I don't, can't, and prefer not to download. So I'm forced to work remotely through ssh. The other thing is, these jobs can sometimes run for hours, of which I don't necessarily need to be connected to completion... or it gets to late and I want to resume the next day. Screen to the rescue, just detach and exit and then the next day re-attach and continue.

I don't know how I missed such a little gem. I'm such a noob.