1. What is tmux?
tmux is a terminal multiplexer!
2. What is a terminal multiplexer?
It lets you switch easily between several programs in one terminal, detach them (they keep running in the background) and reattach them to a different terminal.
Effectively a shell within a shell. Or a Ghost in the shell?
3. Why should I care?
Say you are SSH’d into a box and want to run a process that you know will have to run for a long time and you do not want to get interuppted by say your SSH session closing. Then you are going to want to run a tmux session once you are SSH’d into a box so that the process is owned by a service that is local.
You can do much more with tmux than this, have a read of the docs to see if it’s of use!
4. How to set up tmux
- Install tmux:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install tmux
- Create a new tmux session:
tmux new -s nameofsession- we name the session for ease of reference
- Run the command you require
- Detach from session:
<ctrl>+b D- Press ctrl+b then Capital D (
<shift>+d)
- You are now free to close your ssh session.
5. How to reattach to a running tmux session
- SSH into box
- Attach to running session:
tmux attach -t nameofsession
6. How to kill a session/window
- Attach to running session:
tmux attach -t nameofsession
- Kill session
<ctrl>+b &