screenutils

screenutils is a set of classes that should help handling gnu-screen windows.

Feel free to report any modification you made, the whole code source is available under the terms of the GPLv2.

Example usage

Example in a python console:

>>> from screenutils import list_screens, Screen
>>> list_screens()
[]
>>> s= Screen("session1",True)
>>> # funky prompts could reduce log visibility. Use sh or bash for best results
>>> s.send_commands('bash')
>>> s.enable_logs()
>>> s.send_commands("df")
>>> print next(s.logs)
df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6             20161172   8084052  11052980  43% /
none                   1505916       304   1505612   1% /dev
none                   1512676       936   1511740   1% /dev/shm
none                   1512676       380   1512296   1% /var/run
none                   1512676         0   1512676   0% /var/lock
none                   1512676         0   1512676   0% /lib/init/rw
none                  20161172   8084052  11052980  43% /var/lib/ureadahead/debugfs
/dev/sda7            403567768 196284216 186783420  52% /home
popi@popi-laptop:~/Dev/github/screenutils$
>>> s.disable_logs()
>>> s = None
>>> s = Screen("session1")
>>> s.exists
True
>>> s2 = Screen("session2")
>>> s2.exists
False
>>> s2.initialize()
>>> s2.exists
True
>>> list_screens()
[<Screen 'session2'>, <Screen 'session1'>]
>>>

Installation

You could install screenutils from github, by doing the following:

$ pip install git+http://github.com/Christophe31/screenutils.git

Or by just using the packages published on Pypi, for instance with pip:

$ pip install screenutils

Features

• screens listing
• screen session creation
• screen session closing
• screen code insertion
• screen monitoring/logging
• screen session sharing with unix users (see below)

Core Documentation

Screen class:

• Screen(name, initialize=False) Create a new screen.
  • name (required): The name associated with the screen.
  • initialize: If True, creates a screen session if it does not exists.
• screen.id (property) the id of the screen as a string.
• screen.status (property) the status of the screen as a string.
• screen.exists (property) True if the screen exists (has been initialized)
  • NOTE: .id, .status, .exists are all based off of the output of screen -ls
• screen.initialize Initialize a screen if does not exists yet. Equivalent to running screen -UR screen_name
• screen.enable_logs() turns Screen's logging on. The Logfile's name is automatically set to that of the Screen object.
• screen.log A generator that acts like tailF on the logfile.
• screen.disable_logs() turns logging off.
• screen.kill() Quit the screen. Equivalent to running screen -x screen_name -X quit
• screen.detach() Detach from the screen.
• screen.send_commands(*commands) send bash commands to the screen.
  • *commands the command(s) to run (as a string).
• screen.add_user_access(unix_user_name) Allow another user to access the screen.
  • unix_user_name (required): the unix name of the user to add.
  • *NOTE: to allow this feature, you will need to change some unix rights:
    • sudo chmod +s /usr/bin/screen
    • sudo chmod 755 /var/run/screen

Functions :

• list_screens() list screens. Returns a list of Screen instances.

Exceptions :

• ScreenNotFoundError: Raised when a screen wasn't found.

Known issues

This may not work properly with bpython.

Roadmap

• multi windows screen support