GNU screen is a nice utility that allows running multiple interactive shells from the same terminal session and allows you to detach from your terminal while keeping those shells alive. Later on, you can re-attach to your background screen to get back to your shells. It has a lot more features like automatic session logging and terminal window splitting. You can discover them all in the manual.
How many times did you start a long-running task like gcc compilation on a remote server and then suddenly needed to disconnect from your shell? Maybe you just needed to move to some other place with your laptop, but if you disconnected from your LAN, your ssh connection would go down. How many times you thought “Damn, if I had launched screen before this…”?
Under UNIX-like operating systems, there are several ways to manage long-running processes such as daemons. Process management is a crucial aspect of system maintainance and therefore it’s one of the aspects to take into account when planning a deployment. Since available solutions are getting more and more complex and specialized, I thought of writing a series of articles to recap the state of the art and draw up a comparative analysis.
This post deals with two system-wide alternatives, sysinitv and Mac OS X’s launchd: the first represents the tradition, while the latter represent innovation. Feel free to use comments to share your tips.
