Screen (manual page) is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes. This means you can ssh login to a remote computer, start screen, start a process (like the irc client irssi), detach screen and logout. The process continues to run and you can log back in later from any location and reattach the screen. http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~guckes/screen/ http://linuxreviews.org/man/screen