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).

Sharing a Session

You can use script and mkfifo to allow a second session to supervise the first using this very simple hack.

# on 1st terminal
mkfifo /tmp/session
script -f /tmp/session

# on 2nd terminal
cat /tmp/session

Now the 2nd terminal can interactively watch whatever is going on with the 1st terminal. Occasionally some control characters will get a little garbled when a lot of curses activity is going on, but in general, it works pretty well.

Sessions

Say you're editing in Vim and wrapping it up for the day. You have everything configured to your liking and don't want to go through the hassle of setting everything up tomorrow. Vim allows you to very easily store your current editing session like so:

:mksession work.vim

After that you can quit Vim and come back whenever you want. Once you're back inside Vim, you can type:

:source work.vim

and your last editing session is reloaded. You can also load a session from the command-line like so:

vim -S work.vim