the corner office

My little life lesson learned today is this:

If you discover a tool or utility that will make your life easier, learn to use it NOW.

I've known about the screen utility on Linux for ages. I knew what it would do, and how useful it would be. But I always put off learning how to use it, worrying that I wouldn't have the time to really suss it out. On a whim, I opened the man pages this morning, and within minutes I had the basics, and it was an epiphany. I can't believe I put this off for so long. Stoooopid.

Old Unix/Linux hands would read this and think 'pfff. Dumb mullet.' Guilty as charged.

Screen rocks. It creates a virtual terminal (screen) on a Linux (Unix) box, which you can then connect to and reconnect to as you need, without interfering with the underlying terminal applications. Think Alt-Tab on the command line.

If like me, you like being 'interactive' with a Linux/Unix Domino server console, then screen is a godsend. Start the Domino server inside a screen session, and you can get to it (and leave it) whenever you need, from other machines, ssh sessions, whenever, wherever. No more having to worry about cconsole, which is the crappiest piece of software that Lotus ever wrote.

A quick google this evening found a decent introduction to screen (and some Linux terminal concepts) at Linux Magazine.

I'm converted. Today screen, tomorrow Emacs! ;-)