Gnu screen – get list of window titles

gnu-screentmux

How can I obtain information (title, created time, visible content) about windows in a screen session? I need to do this in a script, so I am not looking for key bindings or interactive commands.

Something like tmux's list-windows would be great.

Best Answer

According to this thread in screen-users such a functionality has been implemented in screen. Apparently I don't have a recent enough version for it to work but this should work in recent versions of screen. [Edit] I just tried with the latest git, it work even if it's not documented in screen -h

screen -Q windows
screen -Q select my_window

The first appearance of the -Q option was in this commit.

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You just hit ctrl-a followed by an a to actually send the ctrl-a to the nested screen instance.

Gnu screen, how to update dynamically the title of a window

In your .bashrc file set your PROMPT_COMMAND like this:

UPDATE:

case "$TERM" in
    screen*) PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033k\033\0134"'
esac

UPDATE: seems to be a bug with echo built into bash. Solution should be either use of /bin/echo or \0134. Try:

$ echo -e "\134 = \0134"
\134 = \
$ /bin/echo -e "\134 = \0134"
\ = \

This is the escape sequence that screen needs to identify which command is being run, and replace the title of your current window.

Then, on your .screenrc file, make sure the following lines exist:

shelltitle '> |something:'
hardstatus alwayslastline

The pattern search|name tells screen to search your end-of-prompt for some string (in this case, '> '). The name part, specifies the default shell name for the window. So, when you have nothing but the shell running, you'll see something like:

$ something:

But when you run top:

$ something:top

Best Answer

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