Running Cygwin Screen as a standalone program?

screen on Cygwin uses the Cygwin dll, so while you could make a minimal configuration with just a couple of files, that would be "running Cygwin". Likewise, screen is only useful with a shell — the same story (for instance bash, again using the Cygwin dll).

A quick check for alternatives seems to show that you would not succeed with

MinGW
Msys2

Regarding screen on Cygwin, this has been discussed at length in Terminal Multiplexer for Microsoft Windows - Installers for GNU Screen or tmux, although not as a "standalone" program.

Thomas Dickey

Posted 2015-05-11T00:13:21.957

Reputation: 6 891

I tried to run it with the DLL's and screen said that the '/tmp/uscreens' couldn't be found, so it doesn't work independantly. – Spideynn – 2015-05-11T12:55:29.817

yes - but providing directories to appease screen might be one of the simpler problems to resolve. – Thomas Dickey – 2015-05-11T20:26:50.497

How would you create the linux-style directories on Windows? I didn't think it was possible because it couldn't find /tmp/uscreens – Spideynn – 2015-05-12T17:35:04.847

When you install Cygwin, it does create the directory (as well as setting a registry value that tells where Cygwin is installed). The short answer is that the Cygwin DLL uses existing directories and the registry value to decide how to manage the directories. – Thomas Dickey – 2015-05-13T14:31:15.697

/tmp exists under the Cygwin install dir. If you add this line to /etc/fstab (also under Cyginw install dir): none /tmp usertemp binary,posix=0 0 0, /tmp will point to your Windows user TEMP dir. When I ran screen first time, it created /tmp/uscreens, when trying to do screen -r it complained about permissions (must be 777) on that dir, though. For some reason, though, after detaching I can only reattach (screen -r) if I connect to Cygwin via PuTTY (either through local SSH or through cygtermd), not from mintty or ConEmu. – Gene Pavlovsky – 2016-10-03T09:47:57.710

Running Cygwin Screen as a standalone program?

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