>>> dante at plethora.net 11/20/01 03:36PM >>>
>Why do so many people seem inclined to use screen when your
>typical Linux installation has 6(SIX!) VC's right at your fingertips.
>(ALT-F1 through ALT-F6)

They don't work over telnet or ssh. And you can't 
necessarily control access to the vc when you 
leave unless you have 'vlock' installed and don't 
mind backgrounding the process.

>Besides, if you logout you loose the screen process so _that_ doesn't
>really answer his question.

Not the "screen" that I've been using. I can start up my quake 
server in a screen session, detach, logout, and then later login 
from anywhere, attach, and see what it's been doing. It's very 
nice for that sort of thing. If you lost the 'screen' process, 'screen' 
would be considerably less useful.

>Using nohup (as previously mentioned and described) will do the job
>quite nicely, and I recall having some luck with simple backgrounding
>with stdout and stderr redirected.

He probably does want to use redirection to make sure he can 
have the opportunity to look over the output, and 'tail -f' the file 
to check progress from time to time while it is processing. For 
interactive (or semi-interactive) programs that don't require 
constant interaction, 'screen' is kind of 'nice'. ;-)

Good luck,

Troy