haven't got access to the most reliable internet connections and it is starting to drive me nuts when I have an SSH session open, and the connection goes down, in the middle of a command.

Ok, the regular Witnesses pretty much all would be familiar with using GNU Screen, which allows you to detach sessions without killing the shell (and what was running), but I find the business of switching between tasks using commands extremely disruptive to my mental flow.

So I wondered, is there some way to launch a SSH session with a command that opens a full terminal rather than just running it on the server?

First, you can open a screen session and detach it as normal in an SSH session, of course. But you can instead type this to establish the session and start using it:

ssh inception -t "screen -R"

If you exit this session, it will also close the screen session. But you can either ctrl-a-d out (and straight back to your local terminal) or if the connection dies or you close the terminal tab or window on your machine, so long as you don't type exit in the shell from the one screen launched above, you can type this command and jump straight back

ssh inception -t "screen -R"

Yes, exactly the same command. If a session is open, it will reattach to it. If there is no session, it will make a new one.

Inside the screen session, programs will not be killed when you lose your connection to the server.

The magic is the -t - this creates a terminal connection on the server that you attach to when SSH answers - if you leave it out, the connection will not show you a terminal.

You can use screen on programs that only produce output but don't allow input like this example:

ssh hostname "tail -f steemd.log"

Even though it will stay connected and continue to show you new lines written to the file, when you break it you break your local SSH not the other end, which then breaks because the SSH disconnects. This can be a handy way to check the logs coming out of the remote server without establishing a full session.

To save yourself typing, you can turn the remote-attach ssh command into a shell script, I called mine sshcreen, by:

sudo nano /usr/local/bin/sshcreen

Put these two lines into the file:

#!/bin/bash
ssh $1 -t "screen -R"

Then sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/sshcreen to make it executable, and you can now skip the complicated string and type this instead:

sshcreen <server address>

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We can't code here! This is Whale country!

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