I haven’t had a ton of time for blogging lately but figured this tip was good enough to throw out there for all the screen users. One way I like to organize servers that I’m ssh’d into is using screen windows. As you hopefully know you can use Ctrl-A c to create sub windows within screen. Then you can switch between them in several ways such as using Ctrl-A X where X is the window number, Ctrl-A n or Ctrl-A p for next and previous, and Ctrl-A “ to get a list of the windows for selection. You can move windows around with Ctrl-A : then type number X where X is the window you want to swap with. Finally, you can also name the windows with Ctrl-A A. So usually I ssh into a server, and manually change the window title to the server name I’m ssh’d into so that its easy to organize and remember where my windows are.
Turns out thats a lot of repetitive work that can easily be scripted. You can create a really simple script called ssh-to and place in your ~/bin or somewhere in your path
#!/bin/bash
hostname=`basename $0`
# set screen title to short hostname
echo -n -e "\033k${hostname%%.*}\033\134"
# ssh to the server with any additional args
ssh -X $hostname $*
# set hostname back when session is done (-s on osx)
echo -n -e "\033k`hostname -s`\033\134"
Now, create symbolic links to the script with each server hostname that you use. This can be a little tedious but you only have to do it once and the benefit is that you can now tab complete ssh’ing into servers.
For example you would do something like
ln -s ssh-to myserver.com
Then anytime you type “myserver.com” the tab completion can fill it out, you’re ssh’d into the server (assuming you have keys setup you don’t have to type a password) and your screen window title is updated with the domain info trimmed off, in this case myserver. Now your screen windows update their own titles anytime you ssh into a new server!
