Episode: 1175
Title: HPR1175: how to start irssi in screen after reboot
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1175/hpr1175.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 20:59:33

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This is Lord Droggenblut that I needed to move away from graphical IRC clients and
I needed something I could access whenever I was on the road from wherever I was because
I've in a few situations where they block IRC such as when I'm at school they like to block IRC
and I just find it very useful to be able to get there. So I went about setting up and IRSSI instance on
a VM I have running on my server at home but I came to the conclusion that for this to really be
useful for me I needed to be able to access it from anywhere hence where screen comes in but I
needed this to automatically restart anytime for some reason I had to reboot the server or the VM
itself and I wanted this to automatically start IRSSI inside of screen every time the machine came
back up so I did a little digging and I found an interesting and I think useful way to do it
logging in as the user who's going to be running this you simply open a terminal and you type
Krontab-e to edit your Krontab entry and we're going to add a simple little entry that's
ampersand reboot space slash user slash bin slash screen space dash lowercase d lowercase
uppercase u uppercase s another space then the word IRC space slash user slash bin slash IRSSI
and what this command does is it automatically start screen or actually it automatically starts IRSSI
inside of a screen session and the flags we gave it the dash dm capital U capital S
start screen and detach mode if the capital U runs screen in utf 8 mode and the dash capital S
gives the screen session a friendly name for reattaching when we use screen dash R so instead of
having to give it some bizarre number we just give it screen dash R space IRC and we've now reattached
to IRSSI instance well just a quick little tip for everyone out there you can use this for
starting other things automatically but i hope some people find this useful
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