Re: terminal clear/refresh after detach

[Lonni J Friedman]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 6:46 PM, Ben Love <address@hidden> wrote:
> * Lonni J Friedman wrote on [2011-09-13 12:36:43 -0700]:
>> On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 10:56 AM, Ben Love <address@hidden> wrote:
>> > * Lonni J Friedman wrote on [2011-09-12 12:17:08 -0700]:
>> >> Greetings,
>> >> I recently upgraded from Fedora14 to Fedora15.  As part of the
>> >> upgrade, I moved from screen-4.0.3 to screen-4.1.0, and inherited an
>> >> annoying behavior.  Prior to the upgrade, whenever I detached from a
>> >> screen session, everything that was present on my terminal prior to
>> >> attaching to a screen session was restored.  Since the upgrade,
>> >> whenever I detach, my terminal is automatically cleared, thereby
>> >> losing all content that was present.
>> >>
>> >> I've googled and looked through the screen man page, but I can't find
>> >> any mention of this behavior (or a means of preventing it).  Is this
>> >> expected behavior, or a bug?
>> >
>> > I think you are intersted in the altscreen option.  I believe it does
>> > what you want.
>>
>> This option doesn't seem to have any impact regardless of whether I
>> set it to off or on in /etc/screenrc .
>
> I think this means your termcap/terminfo settings have changed.  First,
> make sure you aren't using something weird in $TERM (in the shell that
> launches screen, not the shell within screen, which should simply have
> TERM=screen).  Then, try reading man terminfo and man termcap.
> Unfortunately, I've not messed with either enough to know where to
> actually look.  And generally, I think it's a bad idea to try
> customizing that stuff as I would expect most distributions to already
> have sane values for all sane TERM entries.
>
> For comparison, my $TERM prior to launching screen is rxvt-unicode.

$TERM hasn't changed.  It was rxvt before the OS upgrade, and remains rxvt.


>> > Alternatively, you could look into hacks as described here:
>> >
>> > http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/snipplets/screen_saverestore
>> >
>> > using tput smcup and tput rmcup to save and restore the screen manually,
>> > though this is probably not what you're looking for.
>>
>> If there was some way to get screen to invoke them automatically, then
>> that would likely serve as a good workaround.  However, I can't figure
>> out any way to accomplish that.
>
> If you're talking about having this run when you're attaching/detaching,
> then I think a simple shell script around screen would be fine:
>
> #!/bin/bash
> tput smcup
> screen "$@"
> tput rmcup
>
> If you're talking about how to do this from within shells that are
> started by screen, I would probably put something in .bashrc that tests
> for TERM=screen to detemine that it is executing within screen, and make
> the tput smcup and tput rmcup entries within there.  There's probably
> another way to do this that is more elegant, but all my hacks are in
> .bashrc anyway.

I'm talking about doing this outside the screen session.  I tried your
simple shell script, and it didn't help.  The terminal still gets
cleared when I detach.