[screen-devel] feature request (windowlist --dump)

[screen-devel]

First let me say thanks...  Screen is super-great!

The Request:

My request is to add a feature like this:

  screen -S $SCREEN -X windowlist --dump

The new --dump switch for the windowlist command would cause
the current screen invocation to print the titles of $SCREEN
rather than open the window chooser in $SCREEN.  It may be
difficult to route the data stream from $SCREEN to the local
STDOUT, so a variation of my request that (I think) would be
easier to do would also get the job done:

  screen -S $SCREEN -X windowlist --dump_to_file=/tmp/$SCREEN.lst
  
The Rational:

Every now and then, my system at the office has an unexpected
reboot, usually caused by a power failure, and usually on the
weekend when I'm not there.  When this happens, all my screen
sessions get sent to screen session heaven.

My config is nicely tweaked so that my screen window titles
are quite meaningful.  If I had a dump of the window titles
that were running prior to the session wipe-out, it would go a
long way toward reminding me of what I was working on in my
various sessions.

With this feature, I could then have an hourly cron job that
looped through my screens and threw the title dumps into
logger (which would send the output to syslog).

A Supportive Argument:

I am not asking for some sort of "session manager" capability,
which I've seen others request.  I agree that that is not a
good idea...  I think this is a small request...  Just take
the info that windowlist already has and log it to a file
(easy?) or to the screen that's making the query (hard?),
rather than building the window chooser interface.

I thank you for your time and consideration.

- Tor