Cannot detach screen session

Question

I am very new to screen and I have hit C-Something instead of C-a. Now I cannot detach or do any other commands. What can I do to detatch my screen session?

Answer 1

I had a similar problem today. I was transferring a 100GB file over a 1MBps link, and it was halfway into the transfer when my workstation crashed. I brought PuTTY back up and got on my terminal server, but no combination of the detach / reattach commands would work. I decided i would kill screen, so i checked ps to get the PID. While i was looking at the PS output, i noticed that the BASH session i had used to launch Screen was still running. On a whim, i decided to kill that session instead of screen, thinking "This should be like closing the PuTTY window, which allows me to re-attach." Sure enough, i was able to run "screen -dr" succesffully.

Answer 2

ctrl-a+d detaches

Alternative to detatch if you don't need the information on the screen you can simply kill the process.

Not sure of any command that renders the screen unresponsive.

Answer 3

You can also merely logout, by killing the terminal session, then login again and reattach the screen session.

Answer 4

If all else fails, login from another terminal and type: screen -raAdx. This will reattach your screen as shared and allow you to detach it.

Answer 5

Possibly you got C-s (s for "stop") try C-q to resume...