Fix ‘Cannot Open Display’ on Restored GNU Screen Session

Screen does keep a log of past output lines; it's called the “scrollback history buffer” in the Screen documentation.

To navigate through the scrollback, press C-a ESC (copy). You can use the arrow and PgUp/PgDn keys to navigate, as well as other keys to search and copy text. Press ESC to exit scrollback/copy mode.

By default, Screen only keeps 100 lines' worth. Put a defscrollback directive in your .screenrc to change this figure.

If you want a complete log from your script, save it in a file. Run it inside Screen to be able to connect back to the parent shell and easily see if the script is still running, suspend and restart it, etc. Or fork it off with nohup. To monitor the log file while it's growing, use tail -f.

You can pass through the beep from background screens to the foreground session by adding bell_msg "^G" to your .screenrc, also you can add a custom message, example:

bell_msg "^GScreeno numero % is a hollerin'"

Adding the ^G (Control+G) can be done in vi / vim by first pressing Control+V in insert mode, or in emacs by pressing Control+Q.

If you need to be notified of any activity on background screens you can add monitor on to your .screenrc, and customize the message with activity "Something happened on screen %", adding ^G here to ring the bell is also possible, but annoying.

If you are running it locally you can also simply set your chat client to use aplay to play an alert sound file, to distinct it from other beeps that could be less important.

If you run on a remote host you could make some reverse ssh portmapping to some custum service on the client side, and send sound through that, that would be over-course, but add a comment if you need such a solution.