-*-org-*-

This is the README file for the 'screen-wrappers' project.

* Overview
==========

The 'screen-wrappers' project provides a collection of programs that wrap
various common invocations of the GNU screen(1) program.

The current version provides only the screen-ls(1) program, which will format
the output of 'screen -ls' into a table (which improves readability), display
the screen session names without the leading pid value (for easier sorting),
etc.

The goal of the 'screen-wrappers' project is to provide a central location to
collect tools that wrap screen invocations. It is hoped that productizing and
sharing these tools will lead both to improvements of the tools themselves,
help document best practices and/or useful screen recipes, and otherwise make
them available to a wider audience.

Once installed, you will want to read:

    screen-ls(1)


See the "Prerequisites" section below for other programs that must be
installed and configured on your system before you can install the
'screen-wrappers' package.

See the 'BUGS' file for information on reporting bugs.

See the 'INSTALL' file for installation instructions.

See the 'HACKING' file for developer build instructions and the like.

See the 'NEWS' file for changes for this release, and a running list of
changes from previous releases. Any incompatibilities with previous versions
will be noted in the 'NEWS' file.


* Prerequisites
---------------

'screen-wrappers' is intended to be built and run on Unix and Unix-like
systems, so expects a standard set of utilities (cat, sed, awk, rm, ...) to be
present. These utilities are not explicitly listed below as prerequisites as
they should be present on any modern Unix or GNU/Linux system (or in Cygwin,
if you happen to be running on MS Windows).

The 'screen-ls' program (and possibly other tools in the 'screen-wrappers'
project) is implemented in Bash (a Bourne shell derivative). The
'screen-wrappers' project was developed and tested using Bash 4.2.37, but uses
only long-standing bash features; it should probably work with Bash 3.x and
any later versions, as well. It may even work with Bash 2.x; the author would
appreciate hearing about any successes or failures in this area. In the
unlikely event that your system does not already have bash installed, it can
be obtained from the project's site:

    http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/

On a Debian system (including derivatives, such as Ubuntu), you can install
the program via:

    # apt-get install bash

or (for a statically linked version):

    # apt-get install bash-static


Because the 'screen-wrappers' programs are wrappers around the GNU 'screen'
program, that needs to be installed as well (of course). The 'screen' program
is available here:

    http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/

On a Debian system (including derivatives, such as Ubuntu), you can probably
install the program via:

    # apt-get install screen
