Hi!

I have several screen sessions running, one of them named 'test'. I want to send a simple command to there without attaching the screen, so I do:

screen -S test -X ls

But when I attach the screen to see if it has done something, nothing is different... How can I send commands then?

Of course the 'ls' command is not what I want to do, but it's just an example in how this is not working. :-)

Try
The '-X' option executes screen commands. 'ls' isn't a screen command, but stuff is. The argument to stuff is then a string which gets stuffed into the specified session. I use this method quite a bit to launch interactive applications at boot time.

--- rod.

1 members found this post helpful.

Aha ok... And what should I put at the end of the string for it to execute the command, since using just "stuff ls" it just sends the string without executing it?

Ahh, yes; that little complication....
Note carefully the specific use of quotes and backticks.

--- rod.

1 members found this post helpful.

Where can I find all the options for each unix command? Because I'm trying to understand what the "ls -las" and "echo -ne" do, but can't find reference to those options in the man pages, or the internet for that matter... I'm still new around here.

What documentation should I look for, to see what is that "\015"?

The man pages are a great reference, but it can take a while to get used to reading them. I'm suspecting that in this case you are having trouble since you may be looking for an "-las" option in the "ls" manpage. However, there is no "-las" option. It is simply the "-l", "-a" and "-s" options combined.

Try the "ascii" man page.

Cheers,

Evo2.

To explain the immediate question, because there is a fair bit of obscuratta there:
\015 is the octal value of 'newline'/'carriage return'. Putting it in single quotes makes the backslash into not-an-escape, so it denotes a single byte, in octal radix. It is echoed without appending a newline (-ne), which sounds completely redundant, but I think I found it had be like that, and I don't understand why. The output of echo is turned into a commandline argument using the magic of `backticks` and which should be replaced with the preferred $(not_backticks_anymore) notation. It gets appended to the commandline, as the final character of the stuff argument. The double quotes would be unnecessary, if we just wanted the bare ls command, but I like my ls a bit fancier.

The good news is, you aren't likely to bump into anything much weirder than this. Possible, but not often. Screen itself is a bit of an odd thing (but a very useful one), and everything around it seems to be a bit on the fringe, too.

The man pages are great for finding out what existing commands do, but not so much for figuring out what to use to solve your problems. For that, experience is the best reference. And Google. A lot of commands are built into the shell, and for those you'll get dumped into the bash manpage, left to find the particular command on your own. There is also the somewhat arcane 'info' pages, which require some learning to get around the system.


--- rod.