speek

Peek at the last N lines of every GNU screen session without attaching to any of them. Like tail, not tail -f — a quick snapshot of what each session is doing right now.

Installation

git clone git@github.com:sullo/speek.git
cd speek
./install.sh

This symlinks speek.sh to ~/.local/bin/speek (override with PREFIX=/usr/local/bin ./install.sh) so you can just run speek from anywhere. If ~/.local/bin isn't on your PATH yet, the installer will tell you the line to add to your ~/.zshrc / ~/.bashrc.

Re-run ./install.sh after a git pull — it just re-links, it's a no-op if nothing changed.

Usage

speek [lines]

• lines — how many trailing lines to show per session (default: 10)

$ speek 5
===== 86133.ttys006.ranger3 ===== screen -r 86133.ttys006.ranger3
~ this is screen one
~

===== 86202.ttys006.ranger3 ===== screen -r 86202.ttys006.ranger3
~ this is screen two

How it works

For each session listed by screen -ls, it runs:

screen -S <session> -X hardcopy -h <tmpfile>

which dumps that session's scrollback buffer to a file without attaching or disturbing it, then trims the blank-line padding hardcopy adds and tails the result. Temp files live under a mktemp -d directory that's removed on exit.

Notes / limitations

• Sessions that are dead or need multiuser permissions are skipped with a note instead of erroring out.
• How far back hardcopy can see is limited by that session's scrollback buffer size (scrollback / defscrollback in your .screenrc) — if it's small, old output may already be gone.
• Requires screen to be installed. Only tested against GNU Screen on macOS with the system's bash 3.2 (no mapfile/bash-4 features used, so it should run as-is on most Linux boxes too).

License

MIT — see LICENSE.