I am – and have for quite a while been – a huge proponent of GNU Screen for the many-fold improvements that it provides to terminal and SSH sessions. One of the things about screen is that it runs in two processes, one is a headless process that redirects terminal output of applications to it (server process) and the other is a process which connects to the server process allowing interaction with and the viewing of output from applications in the server process (client process). The advantage to this two process approach is that you can run screen from an SSH connection, disconnect the client process, leave and then later reconnect a new client process to the same server process you started earlier, thus allowing session persistence. It’s a wonderful application with many other features that make my life easier.
In addition to being fantastically useful, screen appears to have been written by someone with a sense of humor as it seems to contain rather a few Easter Eggs. One particular Easter Egg that I recently came across is that if the server process dies while the client process is still connected, you meet the error message:
Suddenly the Dungeon collapses!! — You die…
It’s a cryptic and ominous error message that might put you off a little if you don’t know what’s going on. A quick googling will show that some have accidentally misinterpreted the meaning; thankfully I could guess what it was and check google for confirmation.