Multiple Terminals on compute.cla (interactive)

Many have expressed the desire to open multiple terminals during an interactive session.  Here's how you can do it.

Once you have connected to compute.cla and run a qsub command to start a job, you can type “xterm &” (without quotes) multiple times to open multiple xterm windows. 

  • xterm is another terminal program
  • Each xterm session is running within your job on compute.cla.  As an example, if you use the default qsub -IX and get 4 cores and 8GB of RAM and open 3 xterm windows those three windows will be sharing those cores and RAM.
  • When in xterm, hold down the ctrl key and click the left, center or right mouse button to see options for that terminal.  For example, ctrl + right mouse button gives options to change the font size.
  • Once your wall time expires all the xterms will be terminated along with your entire job

By default, xterm starts with fairly small fonts and copy and paste from a Mac doesn't work well.  To fix these issues you can do the following:

Download and place in your home directory the text file Xresources.  You may need to right-click the link and select "Save Link As" to download.

Rename the file using this command:  mv Xresources.txt .Xresources

Run this command to load the settings from the file:  xrdb ~/.Xresources

Now, when you launch an xterm the following changes from default will exist:

  • starts with a larger and TrueType font
  • has a scroll bar allowing scrollback up to 4096 lines
  • background color is set to black, font color is set to white
  • Ctrl Shift C will now work as copy
  • Ctrl Shift V will now work as paste
  • Ctrl + will increase font size
  • Ctrl - will decrease font size

Hint: if you want to change your background and font colors, you can edit the text file and comment out the current colors and remove the comment from the colors you want - there are a dozen or so of each to pick from.  Once you've saved the file, run the xrdb ~/.Xresources command again for changes to take effect.