Thursday, November 20, 2008

Share a Screen Session

It's possible for two users to share a screen session. This is particularly useful if multiple people want to monitor a long running task, and it's easy to do.

user #1:

screen -R longbuild

user #2:

screen -x -R longbuild

The -x flag tells screen to allow you to attach to an already attached session. This is also good for crazy stuff like a collaborative Vim session (if you're into that sort of thing).

4 comments:

Greg Whitescarver said...

Light years ahead of etherpad.com.

As with many 'great new ideas', *nix already has it. Good stuff.

Anonymous said...

Gee, I've always wondered about that. The screen manpage mentions that other users' sessions may be connected to, but I always assumed that default unix permissions on terminals would prevent any such thing.

It's nice when you want to show someone something, but there's still only one cursor. Etherpad has an advantage there in that *simultaneous* on different parts of text is possible.

This reminds me of 'clusterssh' where you can open a slew of ssh sessions and broadcast your keystrokes to each shell simultaneously making apt-get/aptitude upgrading a snap.

Unknown said...

The tips are interesting. Nice blog.

//Jadu, unstableme.blogspot.com

Aaron said...
This comment has been removed by the author.