A quick guide on tmux
tmux is a useful way to maintain working states on remote servers. I use it at work a lot when I have a long running process that I want to come back to later. It allows me to detach and re-attach whenever I want. It’s similar to screen but in my opinion, it’s better.
I’ve assumed that tmux is available for you to run - ask your sys admin!
Running tmux
Again, I’ve assumed you’re running a long-running process on a remote server and that the remote server has tmux on it. Connect to the remote server and type tmux.
By doing that, you have just created your first tmux session that you can disconnect from and come back to later.
[user@server ~]$ tmux
List your sessions
One benefit of tmux is that you can run multiple sessions at the same time. If you’re doing that, you’ll need a way to see what sessions are available, so use the ls argument.
[user@server ~]$ tmux ls
The output will be something similar to:
0: 1 windows (created Wed Dec 6 22:06:27 2017) [63x13] (attached)
Creating a new session
By default, your new session will be given a number to identify it but you can give a session a name if you want to.
You can create a new session with a name of your choice by using the -s argument and supplying a name for the session.
[user@server ~]$ tmux new -s my-long-running-process
Connecting to an existing session
To connect to a session, you can type tmux a and it’ll connect you to the first available session.
[user@server ~]$ tmux a
Or if you have given your session a name, you can attach to it using the name.
[user@server ~]$ tmux a -t my-long-running-process
Detaching from a session
You can detach from an existing session by typing detach. This means that you can shut your terminal window and come back to that session later.
[user@server ~]$ tmux detach
