[syntaxing]

This + VPN idle killing sessions has forced me to get much better at tmux. I highly recommend for others who use SSH often, especially with WFH, to give it a try. The pane structure has made me much more efficient at my work nowadays.

[aftbit]

When my company started, we used tmux in PROD as a process supervisor. We had tons of lines like:

    while true; do ./runserver; sleep 10; done

in a shell script that would start a new server with one window per process. It got called from /etc/rc.local on boot IIRC.

Deploys meant pulling the new code on the server (or maybe just editing it in vim right there), then just Ctrl-C in every terminal (or when I got lazier, `killall runserver`).

This was back in 2010 or so... I have professionally come a long way in the intervening decade, and no longer have any PROD services running in tmux panes, but I definitely learned to love that tool.

[rovr138]

I've done things similar and do it for quick and dirty. Currently I have something like that on a RPi but instead of

    while true;

I have,

    while [[ ! -f "$DIRECTORY"/backup_exit.stop ]]; do
        sleep 3600 # sleep an hour
        time /home/ubuntu/.pyenv/versions/backup/bin/python main.py
    done

Whenever I want the process to stop, `touch backup_exit.stop` . This waits until the run finishes and exists on the next loop.

Anyway, that is saved to a 'backup.sh'

Then I have also,

    #!/bin/bash
    session="test"
    backup="/path/to/backup.sh" 
    
    #create detached session named test
    tmux new-session -d -s ${session}
    # Create windows
    tmux rename-window -t :0 'backup' #rename the first one
    tmux new-window -n 'htop'
    # Run processes
    tmux send-keys -t 'backup' "$backup" ENTER
    tmux send-keys -t 'htop' 'htop' ENTER
    
    

And this is run automatically on @reboot via cron.

[syntaxing]

This is super interesting! Wouldn’t nohup do the same thing though?

[swalladge]

+1 to tmux, or even screen if you can't get tmux installed.

It also protects against flaky network connections and accidentally closing the local terminal emulator.

[whimsicalism]

tmux is legitimately one of my most useful tools in day to day work.