How do I reattach and close multiple screen sessions from a list

Question

I am an Ubuntu 9.04 user. Given a list of screen sessions such as the following:

9076.pts-30.moe (09/27/2009 11:30:08 PM)    (Attached)
8778.pts-24.moe (09/27/2009 11:29:46 PM)    (Detached)
8674.pts-0.moe  (09/27/2009 11:29:25 PM)    (Attached)
22649.pts-28.moe    (09/27/2009 11:51:46 AM)    (Detached)
22543.pts-24.moe    (09/27/2009 11:50:56 AM)    (Detached)
22228.pts-16.moe    (09/27/2009 11:49:59 AM)    (Detached)

How would I close out multiple screens based on a time criterion? For instance, all screens initiated before 12:00 PM. I normally would type:

    screen -dr 22649.pts-28.moe
    exit
    ...

and close each one out manually, but this is tedious. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can send commands to a screen using the -X parameter. So you can close a screen from the command line by saying "screen -S 22649.pts-28.moe -X quit".

To select the screens by time, I guess you have to run a script to compare the times.

Personally, I would use os.popen() and time.strptime() in python.

Answer 2

Here's how I kill all detached screens:

screen -ls | grep Detached | awk -F" " '{print $1}' | xargs -I{} screen -X -S {} kill

if you want to forcibly kill all screens, just change grep Detached above to grep tached. Works for me all the tine, at the very least!

for time criterion, you can start with this:

screen -ls | grep Detached | awk -F " " '{print $2,$3,$4","$1}'

this prints something like:

(01/03/2012 02:10:42 AM),4504.test2
(01/03/2012 02:10:12 AM),4445.test1
(01/03/2012 02:02:58 AM),4333.test0

where the first group is the timestamp and separated by a comma, is the PID.name.

so you could use/pipe to awk (or awk -F"," '{print $1}' to exactly extract the timestamps only, in parentheses) again to parse the time inside the parentheses.. remember, screen -ls always lists the earliest screen last!

I have not figured out how to do time criterion filtering myself, i'll edit this in the future if i could.. good luck buddy!

Answer 3

The number before the dot (22649 in your example) is the PID of the screen process. Just kill it (kill 22649)