Screen is AWESOME!
I’ve been doing some data auditing at Delicious and we have a lot of data, and I work off of a laptop connected to other machines.
So I caved in and started diving into screen.
If your not familiar, screen is a multi-tasking terminal that you can connect and reconnect to. Everything you run in screen keeps running as if you were there. Think of it as VNC for the command line.
I keep my screen session on a linux box at work and now I can do this:
ssh -t myawesomecomputer screen -x
and be connected to my 10 different terminal sessions all at once. I’m connected to any database I might need, and I have several long running tests in others, or even just an open bash prompt at the ready on the right server. Very awesome!