Re: [9fans] reattach to a rio session

[Anthony Sorace <a@9srv.net>]

> After closing drawterm, how do I re-connect to its rio to see again windows which were started before? How do I reattach a window running e.g. 'rc' from other login session to the current?

Short answer:
	You can pre-arrange for this to work with command-line tools. Except in a very limited sense, you can't do this with graphical tools.

Long answer:
	There are various ways to set up an rc session (or any command-line tool) so that you can reattach later, but you need to arrange for that ahead of time. The simplest, using all tools which come with the system, is probably running:
	srv -e 'rc' whatever
and then using "con /srv/whatever" to connect to it later. I use this for a few system services, as it has the fewest moving parts, but it's imperfect (especially for a shell), because local echo won't always be what you expect, you can't get at the file descriptors in all the ways you might like, multiple readers/writers will get screwed up, &c.

	A good solution which is much more flexible and general, but somewhat more involved to set up and learn, is hubfs, available from contrib. See here:
	http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Hubfs/index.html

	As far as I'm aware, there isn't an existing way to do this with graphical programs. Hubfs will allow you to do it in some very limited ways, but it's almost certainly not what you're after.

	In cases where this manner of persistence really matters, we have VNC, although that's obviously unsatisfactory on other fronts. The group at LSUB was doing some great work with a "plan 9 way" of accomplishing this goal in Octopus (http://lsub.org/ls/octopus.html); I don't believe they're still working on that, though.

Anthony