Can I make gnu screen display a message to a user when they attach to a screen session

Question

I was wondering if there is a way to make screen display a message to a user when they attach to a screen session? For instance, if it is preferred that a user does not use a shared screen session for their personal activities "Please do not use this session for personal activities" could be displayed when the user attaches to the screen. I have tried putting an echo command in my screenrc file, but it did not result in anything being displayed (see below).

Thanks for your help, it is much appreciated!

Answer 1

Well, that's not the way echo works, but there are at least two ways to show mot-style notifications under screen:

• Screen will set $TERM to "screen", so you can check its value in the shell startup file, e.g. ~/.bashrc (or /etc/bashrc)

  if [ "x$TERM" == "xscreen" ];
          echo "Please do not use this session for personal activities"
  fi

• If you really want to drive your users crazy, you can use screen's hstatus (or caption, see man) to display a nag message in the bottom line of every screen window, but this won't work if your power-users are using the status line for something else. In ~/.screenrc (or /etc/screenrc) write:

hardstatus on
hardstatus lastline
defhstatus "Please do not use this session for personal activities"

or alternatively

caption always
caption string "Please do not use this session for personal activities"