GNU Screen is one of the most useful utilities you can have at your disposal if you spend any time at all working at the command line. Screen allows you to manage multiple shell sessions from one terminal window or console, view multiple shell sessions at the same time, and even log into the same session from more than one location at a time.

Browsing the Gnome Shell wiki @ live.gnome.org, I stumbled upon some great login screen and lock screen mockups which you can view below:

So, what is Screen? It describes itself as: a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells.

Say you want to write a small shell script that locks up your GNOME desktop at specific intervals. What command would you use? In this case, your best bet would be gnome-screensaver-command –lock This has the same effect as you pushing the Lock Screen button in GNOME. You can forge a small shellscript and use this to lock up your desktop when someone launches an application.

Time to learn about yet another cool little admin application that will change the way you think and work. screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells.

When I started up my first computer I was very excited. I unpacked it from its box. Set it up on a table and turned it on. As the screen flickered into life my excitement mounted. Watching it boot up with some unknown messages scrolling up the screen my excitement became almost unbearable. Then there was a beep and a black screen with a flashing green block.

This could be very useful to you if you’re working in the terminal and need to step away for a moment. You can achieve a locked screen, just like when you do it the graphical way, with this command entered at the command line, or cli…

In this article I will describe a very useful program: GNU Screen. Usually this program is used by people who have a shell account on a Unix server. But it can be also helpful to people who haven’t yet started to use a terminal or even Linux/Unix at all. Screen — simply — is a program which enables users to create more system shells without the need of logging in multiple times.

"I'm used to run emacs from my shell and my mind is not able to switch from the command emacs to emacs-client when I have an opened windows. This is why I wrote this simple shell script that:
* run emacs (and force server-start) in detached screen with a particular id (emax) if this screen doesn't already exist