Your message dated Sun, 17 May 2026 20:12:58 +0200
with message-id <[email protected]>
and subject line Closing: wontfix (feature request)
has caused the Debian Bug report #210975,
regarding screen as default shell causes problems with rsync, unison, etc
to be marked as done.
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210975: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=210975
Debian Bug Tracking System
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--- Begin Message ---
Package: screen
Version: 3.9.15-1
Severity: normal
screen can be configured as a default shell (through chsh), so that as
soon as you log in your previous session is resumed. (See #148715 for
a small glitch in doing this on Debian.) This is quite nice.
Screen runs an underlying shell is either from the 'shell' screenrc
variable or otherwise by running /bin/sh.
However this does cause problems with programs who run non-interactive
servers over ssh. CVS, rsync, and unison are examples of this
pattern; they typically run something like "ssh host unison -server",
and then talk over the ssh socketpair. On the server, sshd runs the
command through the user's default shell. Because sshd is in
non-interactive mode it does not allocate a pty.
This fails when screen is set as the default shell, because screen
refuses to run without a tty:
$ ssh host unison -server
Must be connected to a terminal.
Even if screen did start here, it would probably cause trouble by
trying to interpret vt100 escapes in the binary stream.
I think a good fix would be that if screen is started as a default
shell, and if the terminal is not a tty, then screen should just exec
the real shell and get out of the way. Giving this error message is
not helping anyone as far as I can see.
Indeed it might be better to just invoke a shell in all cases when
there is no tty, but I'm not asking for that now because it might be
confusing in some circumstances.
It would be possible to work around this by using a little wrapper as
the shell that checks isatty() and runs either screen or sh. But I
think there is no strong reason not to just fix it in screen.
This is probably not particularly a Debian bug.
-- Martin
-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux vexed 2.4.22nfsfix #19 Thu Aug 28 12:48:03 EST 2003 i686
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C
Versions of packages screen depends on:
ii base-passwd 3.5.4 Debian base system master password
ii debconf 1.3.12 Debian configuration management sy
ii libc6 2.3.2-4 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii libncurses5 5.3.20030719-2 Shared libraries for terminal hand
ii libpam0g 0.76-13.1 Pluggable Authentication Modules l
-- debconf information excluded
--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---
found 210975 5.0.1-2
tags 210975 + wontfix
severity 210975 wishlist
thanks
Hi,
I consider this to be a feature request (new and improved functionality,
rather than a bug - works as designed).
This feature request is quite old and has not seen any activity in
almost 10 years.
While I agree, in principle, this would be "nice to have", there are
other workarounds to achieving this, such as your .profile file.
Closing as wontfix.
If you still desire this functionality, please raise this directly
upstream:
https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=screen&func=additem
Cheers,
Peter Dey
--- End Message ---
