Screen: multiple-window session manager with detach/re-attach.

GNU screen is something every UNIX user should have in his/her toolbox for everyday work.

It is a utility that allow for multiple text consoles on a single terminal (be it xterm, iTerm or a physical console) with:

• cut & paste between all of them

• independant scrollable history

• dynamic creation/destruction of consoles

but there is more (and where the real value of screen is):

you can detach and re-attach at any time.

That means that you can have long-time running tasks in separate consoles (like ssh on a remmote machine, IRC sessions, ...) on a given machine, detach from the session, move from one physical location to another, connect to the machine through ssh and re-attach to the screen session to keep on working. No need to re-login, re-connect or anything.

That’s brilliant.

More information here