irssi: remotely attach/create a screen in one line

Tue, Mar 8, 2011

If you’re a big fan of irssi and you’re running it on a remote server over SSH and inside a screen, then this a tip you might be interested in.

Just put the following line inside your .zshrc or .bashrc file:

alias rirssi='ssh [email protected] -t screen -dRUS irssi irssi'

This simple alias will allow you to:

Connect to your remote SSH server
Attach to your existing irssi screen named “irssi”
If the screen doesn’t already exist:
- create a new screen
- start irssi inside it
- attach the newly created session

Pretty cool isn’t it? ;-)

Hint from 2016

In the future we’re all using tmux now. Here’s how to do the exact same thing but using tmux.

tmux attach -d -t irssi || tmux new -s irssi irssi

The adventurous people can also combine this to mosh!

mosh [email protected] -- sh -c "tmux attach -d -t irssi || tmux new -s irssi irssi"

Tags: Archlinux, nginx, blog