screen

Both articles from Sébastien Wains's blog

Named pipe

You may know “screen”, tool that can help you put your session on hold and and get back to it whenever you want.
Described below is a way to share your session with someone… this can come in handy while doing support or if you just want to share your session for some reason

You should follow the following steps carefully

User 1 will work in the terminal
User 2 will watch what user 1 is doing

1. User 1 :

mkfifo /tmp/file

2. User 2 :

cat /tmp/file

3. User 1 :

script -f /tmp/file

User 1 can start working, user 2 will be able to follow his work, user 1 should type ctrl + D if wanting to stop sharing the session…

If user 2 tries to input something, the connection to the pipe will be lost and you should get back to step 2.

Screen method

This is a great way if you can’t install anything on the machine. If you are able to get “screen” installed, screen provides a much easier way, which allows all connected users to interact on the shared session. The named pipe method only allowed one user to watch what the other user was doing.

So here it goes…

1. user 1 connects to the machine and type the command “screen”
2. inside the screen terminal, user 1 hits ctrl + a and then type “:multiuser on”
3. user 2 joins in by typing “screen -x”
4. other users can join as described at point 3

Both users are now sharing the session.

Ctrl + a then d will close the screen session

Links :

Source : http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2005/01/screen-window-manager-for-console....