hi all,

I have a (maybe strange) question, which is hard to describe in a subject.

I have a remote server which can be accessed over ssh. I was yesterday sitting in the front of this server and started a application to do its job over night. this was on VT1 (tty1).

this application has a Ncurses interface and <RETURN> has to be pressed a few times to confirm some questions. my problem is that I am not any more sitting in the front of this server and I can only access it over ssh. The application I started yesterday is waiting for me to press <RETURN>, but I am not able to do this remote ...

or, am I? is it possible to show the screen of the tty1 over SSH, and to continue the work which I yesterday started, but now from the remote machine?

if yes, how? it's pretty urgent, so I would appreciate any help.

Thanks a lot

M.

not realy, not without special apps running under the app. _One of those would be Screen. IF you had started screen, and then started the app, you now could get back to it from anywhere. But since it wasnt started inside Screen, theres little you can do.
It is possible to interact with the VC devices directly, but its very limited, and I havnt figured out how to actually interact with it. One can echo text into a VC, but it doesnt get fed to the app in it, but just displayed.

If its possible for you, just kill the app, start screen, and then start the application. Then you can continue it from anywhere, anytime.
is worth a read, and googling will probably yield more userfriendly instructions. if youre not already familiar with screen.

Yep, this is your best bet. I try to never run anything without screen unless I am absolutely sure that I won't need to check it / interact with it.

I use the following wrapper script, do_offline.sh:

#!/bin/sh
if [ -z $1 ]
then
echo "First arg is screen name, rest is command to run"
fi
if [ ! -z $1 ]
then
echo "Running commands under screen name $1"
screen -A -m -d -S $*
fi

You run it as, for example:

do_offline.sh massive_download wget http://www.google.com/

The first argument is just the name of the screen so that you can come back to it at a later date, everything that follows is the program and arguments to run.

When you do that, it'll run it in the background for you. You can then rejoin it with:

screen -R massive_download

Once inside you can press Ctrl-A and then D to detach from it (i.e. leave it running but not on your screen).

I usually use screen, but I forgot it yesterday. still thanks for the help and for the nice script ledow. usefull.

M.