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Comment by srik | Hacker News Reader

Screen is great. Though not it's fault, the only downside is that it cant persist through a machine restart.

Nope, but you can script both screen and tmux, and have it automatically start a screen session for you when you login.

I've got a little bash script for my VM that launches tmux, and starts a development web server in one of the windows, and tailing logs in another, and then dumps me into my project directory.

I also found tmux much, MUCH easier to script than screen.

Any good resources you'd recommend for scripting tmux?

I just googled around, read the man page, and eventually came up with https://github.com/pavellishin/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/vodk...

This is true, but:

   11:12:52 up 44 days, 54 min, 63 users

The machines I connect to are restarted rarely. I expect this particular machine to be up until Christmass time, at which point there will probably be some scheduled maintenance.

Can you say the same about your workstation? Can you say the same about your power grid? Can you say the same about your internet connection?

Screen/tmux/dtach are so trivial to implement and use and make the connection much more bulletproof that if you foresee there ever being a possibility that you might disconnect and lose work, then you should probably be using one of them.

I think you misunderstood me. I'm the person who said how great Screen is at the top of this thread. My uptime comment was in response to someone who said "the only downside is that it cant persist through a machine restart." That's not much of a downside for me because the machines I have my Screen sessions on are down so rarely - literally, less than half a dozen times a year.

In other words, I use Screen when I connect to remote machines. Those machines go down rarely.

You are 100% correct. My apologies.

My point though, which I'm sure you'll agree with, was to preempt the idea that "my machines don't crash, so I don't need it."

This is my workstation at home:

    %uptime
    11:49AM  up 143 days, 17:08, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

My internet connection has been up for the last 65 days (yay for actually logging data). I don't keep remote connections to servers as I do all my work on my workstation and push when needed at which point my servers automatically pick up the changes and put them into {testing,staging,production} depending on where I push.

linux has this: http://cryopid.berlios.de/

Just went and checked it out, the specifically list screen as something they'd like to support soon, but that doesn't work (I think because "Multiple processes with hierarchy" doesn't work yet).

So... maybe someday, but not yet.

I've never restarted my Linode ;-)

What about when a kernel update is due? Is something fancy like live patches (via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ksplice or the like) happening or are you simply skipping security updates?

Well, I've only had it for a month. No, I'm not going to try to do anything fancy, the machine will go down for kernel updates just like any other.

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