Re: how to kill some borked elements in screen

[Chris Jones]

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 12:38:51PM EDT, Dan Mahoney, System Admin wrote:
> On Thu, 28 May 2009, Albert Vilella wrote:
> 
> >Hi,

> >I've got a screen session with about a dozen of terminals, and a
> >couple of them are basically unresponsive.  I can navigate to them in
> >screen, but they don't respond. Is there a way to kill them or hide
> >them so that they don't show up when navigating down to all my
> >terminals?
> 
> Ctrl-a K, when on the unresponsive screen, or ctrl-a, :kill [enter].
> 
> The manpage says this:
> 
> Note: Emacs users should keep this command in mind, when killing a
> line.  It is recommended not to use "C-a" as the screen escape key or
> to rebind kill to "C-a K".

Well, actually the built-in default mapping for the "kill" command
appears to be:

Ctrl-a Ctrl-k

If you are in a shell that uses emacs-style keybindings and type some
command at the prompt you could issue a Ctrl-a to make the cursor move
to the beginning of the line and follow up with a Ctrl-k to delete to
the end of the line.

With the default key bindings, gnu/screen would intercept this sequence
and bring up the "Really kill this window y/n" prompt.

The way to work around this issue as recommended by the manual is either
not to use Ctrl-a as your screen escape key or to rebind kill to
something else, such as "Shift-k".

> But that is what it came bound to by default on my system.  Perhaps 
> outdated docs?

Possibly because your .screenrc has something like this:

# remove dangerous keybindings
bind ^k                 # bind Ctrl-k to nothing

# replace them with safer ones
bind 'K' kill           # bind Shift-k to kill command

If I am guessing correctly, this may be because the screenrc templates
that ship with screen usually have such bind commands?

If you do not have these bind commands in your ~/.screenrc, check the
"CUSTOMIZATION" paragraph in the manual for other locations where screen
looks for screenrc files.

In any case, it appears that the doc is correct, if possibly a little
cryptic.

CJ