Previous posts about screen have shown a few new tools for searching your list of open screen sessions.o

Today, I finally sat down and worked on the next installment: Being able to query any screen window and the window list. The difference between the previous script is that we can now grep screen windows other than the 0th one. Additionally, we can now grep the screen window list (which, by the way, has some excellent information).

To that end, I present now two scripts:

• screen-session-hardcopy.sh
• screen-session-search.sh

You need both for this to work optimally, but they exist separately because the functionality is somewhat distinct.

The 'hardcopy' script takes a single argument, a screen session. It will hardcopy all windows in that screen session including the window list. If you specify OUTDIR in your environment, the screen hardcopies will be put in that directory; otherwise, the output directory is printed to stdout for consumption by another script.

The 'search' script runs the hardcopy script on all active screen sessions (in parallel, yay xargs). Once it has all of the copies, it will grep through the output for your query string (regular expression). It supports 3 flags:

• -t - only search 'window titles' (ie; only window list output)
• -w - only search window contents (ie; exclude window list output)
• -l - only search the 'location' field of the window list

Now, with a single command, I can find out where that ssh session to 'foo' disappeared to. Here's an example screen window list capture (accessed with Ctrl+A " (doublequote))

Num Name                                                              Location Flags

  0 zsh                                                                        syn $
  1 zsh                                                                      scorn $

Now, I want to find all sessions open to 'scorn':

% screen-session-search.sh -t 'scorn'
sty 18210.pts-8.snack window 1
sty 18556.pts-0.snack window 0

It found 2 sessions. I can attach to the first one with:

screen -x 18210.pts-8.snack -p 1
          ^ screen session     ^ window

caveat: I've been hacking on things all night, so the code may or may not be very readable. Apologies if you go blind while trying to read it ;)

Like I said, I run screen in all of my xterms...

xterm sets an environment variable in child processes: WINDOWID. This is the X window id of the xterm window. Using this, we can extend upon my last post and come up with a much neater solution. Knowing what screen session you want to bring forward (assuming it's running in an xterm), we can run a command inside that session that grabs the $WINDOWID variable in the shell and uses xdotool to activate the window.

session=$(sh screen-find.sh "#freebsdhelp")
STY=$session screen -X screen sh -c 'xdotool windowactivate $WINDOWID'

Running this causes my IRC window to be activated by xdotool, which means it is now active, focused, and on top.

This isn't entirely optimal, because it assumes the xterm attached to that screen session is the xterm that launched it. If you run 'xterm -e screen -RR' and close the xterm (don't log out of the shell), then rerun 'xterm -e screen -RR' it will attach to that previous screen session, but the WINDOWID will understandably not be correct any longer.

So what do we do? Using the screen session given, we create a new window in that session and set the title of that window to a generated string. We then use xdotool to search for that string and activate the window. Once we get there, we can kill that new screen window we created and we are left with the terminal holding our screen session sitting in front of us.

I wrote a script to do just that tonight: screen-activate.sh. Example usage: screen-activate.sh 24072.pts-25.snack

This has a great benefit of supporting every terminal program that understands how to set the terminal window title when screen changes it's title. I have tested my .screenrc in Eterm, Konsole, gnome-terminal, and xterm - all know when screen changes it's title if you put this in your .screenrc:

hardstatus string "[%n] %h - %t"
termcapinfo xterm 'hs:ts=\E]2;:fs=\007:ds=\E]2;screen (not title yet)\007'

# Might need this:
termcapinfo  * '' 'hs:ts=\E_:fs=\E\\:ds=\E_\E\\'

Scenario: I run lots of xterms. Each xterm runs a single screen session(*). At any given time, I can only see some of the xterm windows (the others are hidden).

(*) All my xterms run with: 'xterm -e screen -RR'. This causes them to attach to the first-found detached screen, and if none exist creates a new screen session. See run-xterm.sh for my pleasant, random-colored xterm script.

Problem: I forget where I put things. I can't find that terminal where I'm editing foo.c!

Possible Solutions:

1. Bad: Kill the vim session that's editing the file, and rerun vim somewhere else.
2. Good: Use xdotool to search window titles for 'foo.c'
3. Great: Find the screen STY variable for the process 'vim foo.c'
4. Great: Ask each open screen session about what it is on screen

Today, we'll cover the two 'great' solutions. I wrote both of these a while ago, but I totally forgot to post about them. Here you go :)

Find a screen by it's child processes

Tool: screenps.sh

This tool takes a regexp pattern as the only argument and will output a list of screen sessions having child process commands that match that pattern. This is useful for finding what screen is running 'vim foo.c'

% ./screenps.sh 'vim foo.c'
23464.pts-0.snack

Find a screen by what is being displayed

Tool: screen-find.sh

This tool takes a regexp pattern as the only argument. It uses screen's hardcopy command to save the on-screen buffer and then applies the regexp given to the buffer. If it matches, the screen session is output. There is special behavior if only one screen session is found: If the screen session is currently attached, it will flash that screen session giving you a visual clue about where it is; if it is not attached, it will attach to it.

% ./screen-find.sh "keynav"
28504.pts-27.snack

In case you still aren't clear, the two tools help you find your lost screen sessions. Maybe they aren't lost, but certainly it's easier to search for them by text than by eyeballs if you know what's in them.

A short summary: screenps.sh will search for commands running in a screen session and screen-find.sh will search for literal text displayed in a screen session. Both are super useful.

Note: Currently, screen-find.sh can only capture the contents of the 0th screen window (screen sessions can have multiple windows). I worked for a while on solving this, but for whatever reason I couldn't get it working properly.