Screen Fix

The screen utility is not included on some server builds. You *have* to have screen or tmux as a DBA or long-running scripts and DML will timeout and the ssh daemon will boot you off the server.

As a workaround, I copy the “screen” binary from /usr/bin/screen on a server that does have it installed and put it in my ~/bin directory.  Ordinarily, screen requires write access to /var/run/screen — but there’s a workaround.

Copy the screen binary from a compatible system to your personal bin directory.

Fortunately, screen reads a environment variable SCREENDIR to utilize an alternative socket directory.

So to work around it, you can create a directory, such as ~/.screen:

mkdir ~/.screen && chmod 700 ~/.screen

and export the SCREENDIR to point to that directory:

export SCREENDIR=$HOME/.screen

You can also put this line into you ~/.bashrc or ~./profile so that it will also take effect afterwards.