Tmux – How to Start with Attach if a Session Exists

tmux

If I use

tmux attach

I can attach to a running session but if there is no session running, I only get the error

no sessions

How can I automatically start a new session if there is none running? something like

tmux attach-or-create-new-session

Best Answer

The answer is much simpler. Just put this in your ~/.tmux.conf file:

# if run as "tmux attach", create a session if one does not already exist
new-session -n $HOST

If you run tmux attach and there is a session, then it will attach to that session (whether it's already attached or not). If there is not a session already then it will create one for you.

Related Solutions

Tmux: Set default session for attach

It is time sensitive.

From the man page:

The target-session rules for attach-session are slightly adjusted: if tmux needs to select the most recently used session, it will prefer the most recently used unattached session.

Your shell alias is the way to go for this, it is not a workaround, but the way Unix/Linux works. Small tools to do small things to produce great results.

Attach to tmux session and run a command

You can attach to a running tmux session and spawn a new window which runs a particular command:

tmux attach \; new-window vim

Note that this does not spawn vim in the pre-exsiting window - there is no facility for doing that, it doesn't really make sense: as @Falcon Momot points out, an existing window could be running anything, the only way to issue commands is "send keys".

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Tmux: Set default session for attach

Attach to tmux session and run a command

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