- kill a screen session
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- Kill detached screen session [closed]
- 11 Answers 11
- Example
- How Do I Close a Screen Session?
- What is a Screen?
- Setting-up Screen Sessions
- Closing a Screen Session
- Conclusion
- About the author
- Talha Saif Malik
kill a screen session
I’m trying to kill a screen session. I noticed a lot of other related questions, but none of those answers are working for me. I am trying to kill the following session:
screen -ls There is a screen on: 23520.pts-6.porkypig (09/30/2013 02:49:47 PM) (Detached) 1 Socket in /var/run/screen/S-root. screen -r 23520.pts-6.porkypig Now I am in the session. According to the documentation: http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/manual/screen.html#Quit I am supposed to press «control a» and then «control \». I do that and nothing happens. Another solution said to press Ctrl + a and type :quit. However, again it doesn’t do anything. In fact, pressing control + a , absolutely nothing happens afterwards except a message «No Other Window»
in screen v4.x, to kill all sessions, ps aux | grep «SCREEN» | awk ‘
For the record, you can just do screen -r porkypig or screen -r 23520 , rather than having to include the full string. Screen names are supposed to make things easier, not more complicated.
13 Answers 13
- Rationale: -X = Execute command, -S session PID to execute on
- Example: screen -XS 20411 quit
- Source: innaM’s Answer
i like this one too. plus can always throw it in a loop to get rid of all sessions if needed: for session in $(screen -ls | grep -oP ‘\d+\.\w+’ | cut -d. -f1); do screen -S «$
first you need to re attach to the screen session
screen -r 23520 as you have done. Then press ctrl + a and then a k and press y when it asks if you really want to kill the session
This works if there is a problem with a process running inside the screen, but not if there is a problem with screen itself. That is the case 99% of the time, and has the added benefit of only affecting a single window within the screen rather than terminating all windows.
This command will kill all screen sessions, if that is desired:
So with all those official suggestions, I have one here that i feel is easier, and just as effective, and kind of more straight forward:
Who wants to go into an unknown and un-needed screen just to press in a couple commands that most might barely remember? This avoids going into it at all, and kills it straight off.
Plus, if you have more than one, this will take them all in one fell swoop.
Not a good choice. I’ve been doing it for some time. Sometimes it causes bad behaviors (e.g. logging out from your user account immediately). Also, as @Mikkel mentioned, it could cause to close all your screens, which would not be what you want. Sometimes you need to keep running some (e.g. some are running by system) and stop some other screens.
This will kill all the detached screens:
screen -ls | grep detached | cut -d. -f1 | awk '' | xargs kill
This will kill all screens, attached or detached
screen -ls | grep pts | cut -d. -f1 | awk '' | xargs kill
Like you, I wanted to kill my screen session and found the documentation unhelpful. Convinced that there must be a keyboard shortcut, I found that
ctrl + a then \
works
I then get the prompt: «Really quit and kill all your windows [y\n]»
I am not sure why the documentation says ctrl + a then ctrl + \ . That doesn’t do anything for me.
we can also use the exit command to terminating screen
Easiest and most straightforward approach! You will, of course, first need to reattach to the screen session.
I encountered this problem when updating screen. The screen command would hang when attempting to reattach the session, regardless of how many -D or -R I added to the command. However, screen -ls conveniently provides the pid of the session, allowing you to intervene using the following:
10:42 user ~ $ screen -ls There is a screen on: 5730.my_screen (Detached) 1 Socket in /tmp/screens/S-user. 10:42 user ~ $ sudo kill 5730 10:43 user ~ $ screen -ls No Sockets found in /tmp/screens/S-user. (This is similar to Brian Thomas’s answer, but his will kill all running screen sessions, which may not be what you want if you have multiple screens open but only one misbehaving.)
After 6 hours breaking my head all over internet. yours was the only answer that worked. Thanks mate!
You can find the process id of the attached running screen. I found it same as the session id which you can get by command:
screen -ls
And you can use following command to kill that process:
kill [sessionId] or
sudo kill [sessionId]
You can kill the screen even if it is attached on some other terminal window.
You can use this to kill a session
Press ctrl+d to kill screen window. Repeat this until you kill all screen windows. Once you ran out all windows screen will kill the session and terminating. Shortest solution if you not having many windows
You can just simply type exit while in a recording mode, I found out it to be most convenient as it directly exits the running screen.
Simply, use the exit command inside a screen window and if you have a running process press control + z before that.
This doesn’t answer the question (how to kill a screen session, as opposed how to exit normally) and it doesn’t expand on the other answers. A good answer might cover the normal exiting procedure and then document a few ways you can kill screen if that doesn’t work.
I believe what is being asked is how to ‘quit’ a screen session from within screen itself. This would kill all open terminals in the session and leave the user at the prompt for the parent terminal. The session can be suspended from within using CTRL-A, CTRL-Z. But this creates a a problem I’m trying to avoid which is leaving a bunch of opened screen sessions over time and then not knowing which ones are truly active and which ones I should have closed.
After lots of looking, I believe there is no way to do this. Killing them using the PID method is ok, but if there are many sessions open, some of which I might be using, I don’t always know which ones to kill.
So what I do when I’m truly done with a screen session is to repeatedly hit CTRL-d to close each terminal individuly until the session completely exits.
This is the best solution I’ve found.
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Kill detached screen session [closed]
Locked. This question and its answers are locked because the question is off-topic but has historical significance. It is not currently accepting new answers or interactions.
screen -X -S [session # you want to kill] kill 11 Answers 11
«kill» will only kill one screen window. To «kill» the complete session, use quit .
Example
$ screen -X -S [session # you want to kill] quit For dead sessions use: $ screen -wipe
You can kill a detached session which is not responding within the screen session by doing the following.
- Type screen -list to identify the detached screen session.
~$ screen -list There are screens on: 20751.Melvin_Peter_V42 (Detached)
screen -r 20751.Melvin_Peter_V42
@laffuste ‘s comment worked for me, but quit and :quit lead to command not found on my remote Linux server (perhaps differences between versions of the OS or screen are to blame)
List screens:
There is a screen on: 23536.pts-0.wdzee (10/04/2012 08:40:45 AM) (Detached) 1 Socket in /var/run/screen/S-root. Kill screen session:
It’s easier to kill a session, when some meaningful name is given:
//Creation: screen -S some_name proc // Kill detached session screen -S some_name -X quit This answer uses the name of the session, which is way more convenient than looking up the ID. Thank You!
You can just go to the place where the screen session is housed and run:
There is a screen on: 26727.pts-0.devxxx (Attached) 1 Socket in /tmp/uscreens/S-xxx. The uscreens directory will not have the 26727.pts-0.devxxx file in it anymore. Now to make sure just type this:
No Sockets found in /tmp/uscreens/S-xxx.
This is the only solution that will work if the screen is "stuck", ie. not dead, but cannot be attached to.
This helped me when the screen was utterly locked, but I did need to find and kill the actual process as well. ps aux | grep screen found the pid and I issued a kill to remove it. Depending on what you had running in your screen, you may have temp files and locks to clean up as well.
Should clean all dead screen sessions.
@ShihaoXu Dead means the session is unreachable and on localhost (socket connection is broken). - see gnu.org/software/screen/manual/screen.html
alias cleanscreen="screen -ls | tail -n +2 | head -n -2 | awk ''| xargs -I<> screen -S <> -X quit" Then use cleanscreen to clean all screen session.
A simple one-liner: screen -ls | grep Detached | cut -d. -f1 | awk '
Worked a treat, but had to modify it slightly to work on OSX: screen -ls | tail +2 | head -2 | awk '
Slight improvement:-screen -ls | grep Attached | cut -d. -f1 | awk '
works. This is from within the screen session.
To kill all detached screen sessions, include this function in your .bash_profile:
killd () < for session in $(screen -ls | grep -o '7\') do screen -S "$" -X quit; done > == ISSUE THIS COMMAND [xxx@devxxx ~]$ screen -ls == SCREEN RESPONDS There are screens on: 23487.pts-0.devxxx (Detached) 26727.pts-0.devxxx (Attached) 2 Sockets in /tmp/uscreens/S-xxx. == NOW KILL THE ONE YOU DONT WANT [xxx@devxxx ~]$ screen -X -S 23487.pts-0.devxxx kill == WANT PROOF? [xxx@devxxx ~]$ screen -ls There is a screen on: 26727.pts-0.devxxx (Attached) 1 Socket in /tmp/uscreens/S-xxx. How Do I Close a Screen Session?
Sometimes we execute multiple screen sessions in GNU Screen which necessitates cleanup. In this short guide, we will walk you through the options of closing a screen session but firstly, let’s understand some essential information about the screen.
What is a Screen?
A terminal multiplexer is referred to as screen. Multiple interactive shells of the physical terminal are multiplexed by the screen. It permits the user to perform several tasks running in each terminal. All of these independent screen sessions execute their programs. If you accidentally closed or get disconnected from any screen session, that process will run within the screen session.
For example, when upgrading an Ubuntu server via SSH, if your SSH session is terminated for any reason, the screen command will continue the upgrade process undoubtedly.
Here, we have provided you a list of important keyboard shortcuts for managing various nested sessions.
| Function | Keyboard Shortcut |
| Showing keybindings | Ctrl+a ? |
| Ending session and terminating Screen | Ctrl+a \ |
| Closing the current session | Ctrl+a X |
| Closing all sessions except the current one | Ctrl+a Q |
| Splitting current region vertically into two regions | Ctrl+a l |
| Splitting current region horizontally into two regions | Ctrl+a S |
| Switching to session number 0 | Ctrl+a ” |
| Switching to the previous session | Ctrl+a p |
| Switching to the next session | Ctrl+a n |
| Listing all sessions | Ctrl+a 0 |
Now, we will demonstrate to you the complete procedure of closing an existing screen session. Before starting this, check out the below-given method for setting up some screen session.
Setting-up Screen Sessions
As a result of the command execution, two sessions will be initialized named “my_session_1”, and “my_session_2”.
Now, list out all screen sessions by writing out the following command:
Here, the output will also give you information about the existing screen session, other than the newly created one.
One method of ending a session is to attach it first and then end it. We will follow this method in the upcoming section. We took “my_session_1” as an example, you can choose the session which you want to end.
Utilize the following command for checking related information about the “my_session_1” screen session.
Closing a Screen Session
Note the complete id of the screen session. After that, attach this screen session using the “-r” option in the screen command.
In your terminal, type “exit” to exit this screen session.
As you can see, the output declares that the process is terminated successfully.
Another method of ending a screen session is to press “CTRL+a” combined with the “\” key while a session is attached.
Conclusion
The screen multiplexes numerous interactive shells of the physical terminal. It also allows its user to execute multiple tasks in each terminal simultaneously. There comes a case where cleanup is required and for that, you want to end a screen session. In this post, we have discussed two distinct methods for ending a screen session.
About the author
Talha Saif Malik
Talha is a contributor at Linux Hint with a vision to bring value and do useful things for the world. He loves to read, write and speak about Linux, Data, Computers and Technology.