Screen

According to its website, screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells.

That means you can have several interactive shells open within the same terminal, and switch between them using key shortcuts.

The main advantage though is that you can disconnect from it, and reconnect at some later point in time. For example, you are working at the office, using an SSH connection to a server. In the shell running on that server, you use screen. Now you disconnect, go home, log in to the server at work using SSH. You can then reconnect to that session to find all your shells exactly as you left them (assuming the server didn’t reboot).

This page is not on how to use screen, there are extensive tutorials on that, e.g., the one by Jack Huckaby, or a very brief one by Matt Cutts.

Some tips and trick make using screen a lot easier though.

1. Use .screenrc to make your life easier, and be more productive when using screen.