Escape key
All screen commands are prefixed by an escape key, by default C-a (that’s Control-a, sometimes written ^a). To send a literal C-a to the programs in screen, use C-a a. This is useful when when working with screen within screen. For example C-a a n will move screen to a new window on the screen within screen. |
Getting in
screen -S <name> | Start a new screen session with session name |
screen -ls | List running sessions/screens |
screen -x | Attach to a running session |
screen -r <name> | Attach to a running session with name |
screen -dRR | The “ultimate attach”Attaches to a screen session. If the session is attached elsewhere, detaches that other display. If no session exists, creates one. If multiple sessions exist, uses the first one. |
Getting out
screen -d <name> | Detach a running session |
C-a d | Detach |
C-a D D | Detach and logout (quick exit) |
“C-a : quit” | Exit screenor exit all of the programs in screen |
C-a C-\ | Force-exit screen(not recommended) |
Help
C-a ? | See helpLists keybindings. The man page is the complete reference, but it’s very long. |
Window Management
C-a c | Create new window |
C-a C-a | Change to last-visited active window(commonly used to flip-flop between two windows) |
C-a <number> | Change to window by number(only for windows 0 to 9) |
C-a ' <number or title> | Change to window by number or name |
C-a n or C-a <space> | Change to next window in list |
C-a p or C-a <backspace> | Change to previous window in list |
C-a " | See window list(allows you to select a window to change to) |
C-a w | Show window bar(if you don’t have window bar) |
C-a k | Kill current window(not recommended) |
C-a \ | Kill all windows(not recommended) |
C-a A | Rename current window |
Split screen
C-a S | Split display horizontally |
C-a | | Split display verticallyor C-a V (for the vanilla vertical screen patch) |
C-a tab | Jump to next display region |
C-a X | Remove current region |
C-a Q | Remove all regions but the current one |
Scripting
| Send a command to a named sessionscreen -S <name> -X <command> |
| Create a new window and run ping example.comscreen -S <name> -X screen ping example.com |
| Stuff characters into the input buffer using bash to expand a newline character (from here)screen -S <name> [-p <page>] -X stuff $’quit\r’ |
| A full example# run bash within screen screen -AmdS bash_shell bash # run top within that bash session screen -S bash_shell -p 0 -X stuff $’top\r’ # … some time later # stuff ‘q’ to tell top to quit screen -S bash_shell -X stuff ‘q’ # stuff ‘exit\n’ to exit bash session screen -S bash_shell -X stuff $’exit\r’ |
Misc
C-a C-l | Redraw window |
C-a [ | Enter copy modeor C-a <esc> (also used for viewing scrollback buffer) |
C-a ] | Paste |
C-a M | Monitor window for activity |
C-a _ | Monitor window for silence |
C-a C-v | Enter digraph (for producing non-ascii characters) |
C-a x | Lock (password protect) display |
C-a : | Enter screen command |
C-a H | Enable logging in the screen session |