Persistent SSH sessions with screen

Do you ever need to kick off a long-running command while SSHed to a server, but be able to disconnect and reconnect at will? You can do this with screen.

Before doing anything, start a screen session:

screen

When you’re ready to put your work on hold, detach the screen:

screen -d

If you have a long-running command running, you can detach that screen from a different shell session by specifying the process id:

# look up the process id
ps aux | grep SCREEN
# detach that screen
screen -d <my_process_id>

You can now disconnect from the server safely.

When you reconnect, you can also reconnect to your screen session:

screen -r