What's a handy terminal command you use often?

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Since nobody has said yet, I use screen pretty heavily. Want to run a long running task, starting it from your phone? Run screen to create a detachable session then the long running command. You can then safely close out of your terminal or detach with ctrl a, d and continue in your terminal doing something else. screen -r to get back to it.
- I would know this as tmux, is there a difference?
  
  no, tmux is a newer screen. some of us havent switched cos we're too lazy i guess? i think the common wisdom is that it's better. i havent tried cos i already know enough of screen and it's fine for me
  
  Or you can learn both and spend the rest of your life trying screen commands in tmux and vice versa.
  
  mmmmmm <3
  
  gnu screen is just a different program than tmux. they do the same thing though
- I recently switched to tmux and boy, it's way better. I basically use only tmux now anymore. Creating panes to have two processes in one glance, multiple windows, awesome. Plus all the benefits of screen.
  
  Try zellij. Not as popular as tmux, but very intuitive to use.
  
  Maybe someone reading wants to now about prefix+s. This doubles your excitement.
- In a similar vein, nohup lets you send tasks to the background and seems to be everywhere.
  
  You can't mention nohup without at least mentioning kill -9 or pkill to slay the monster you created you madman
  
  Sometimes I'll just reboot the entire damn machine just to be safe ;)
  
  shutdown -r now
  
  Eyyy, don't hate, this is how I start all my work programs. That command is really nice and creates all work programs as children of a single terminal session for easy closing later.
  
  No hate! Just need to make sure people know so they don't create a bazillion threads without realizing it, or how to stop them effectively
- Also, screen can connect to an UART device or serial or anything that offers up a TTY
- Don’t use screen, but I do use tmux pretty heavily.
- I Always forget to run screen first, so I just rely heavily on dtach
  
  Simply change your terminal command to execute the terminal multiplexer of your choice.
  man terminal_of_choice, look for (start) command.
  
  No thanks, I'm good
- How does screen / tmux work when detached from a session, how does it keep the session alive (both when running locally, and while ssh:ing to a server)? Is there a daemon involved?
  
  You can find out by running screen and executing pstree, that way you can see how the screen process is run.

276 comments