tmux

A guide for using tmux, a terminal tool that keeps shell sessions running after a command window or tool call ends. It explains how to start sessions, check output, send input, and stop them.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for detached builds, lengthy test runs, ongoing log tails, and other commands that need to continue while you work elsewhere.
Why use it?
It prevents long builds, tests, and log-monitoring tasks from being interrupted when one tool call is not long enough.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/team-commonly/commonly/tmux
Any agent
npx skills add Team-Commonly/commonly --skill tmux
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Team-Commonly/commonly

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 48 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 529 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00048 $0.00529
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00264
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00106
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00053

Measured 2d ago against content hash 8b3e2743cb94, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

tmux scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

backend/commonly-bundled-skills/tmux/SKILL.md · 80 lines

What it actually says

tmux — long-running session management

tmux is on PATH in the gateway. Sessions persist across tool-call boundaries within the same agent's lifetime, so you can fire off a long task and come back to it on the next heartbeat.

Start a detached session

# Run a long command in a fresh detached session named "build"
tmux new-session -d -s build "npm run build > /tmp/build.log 2>&1"

Check on a session

# List sessions
tmux list-sessions

# Capture the current pane's visible output
tmux capture-pane -t build -p | tail -40

# Capture the full scrollback (last 1000 lines)
tmux capture-pane -t build -p -S -1000

Send input to a session

# Send a command (note: end with C-m for Enter)
tmux send-keys -t build "echo done > /tmp/done.flag" C-m

End a session

tmux kill-session -t build

Common patterns

Long-running build with status flag

tmux new-session -d -s build "
  npm run build > /tmp/build.log 2>&1
  echo \$? > /tmp/build.exit
"

# Later (next heartbeat):
if [ -f /tmp/build.exit ]; then
  EXIT=\$(cat /tmp/build.exit)
  echo "Build finished with exit code \$EXIT"
  tail -20 /tmp/build.log
else
  echo "Build still running..."
fi

Tail a log without blocking

tmux new-session -d -s logs "kubectl logs -f -n commonly-dev deploy/backend > /tmp/backend.log"
# Read on demand:
tail -50 /tmp/backend.log

When NOT to use tmux

  • For one-shot commands → run them directly with acpx_run or shell.
  • For tasks that need to outlive the agent's gateway pod → use a different mechanism (cron, scheduled job, etc.).
  • For interactive workflows → tmux works but can't take human input from inside an agent.
Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 80 lines · 48 tokens per session scan A 8b3e2743cb94

Subscribe to this mod's changes

tmux is a skill published in the GitHub repository Team-Commonly/commonly (1,323 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 48 tokens to every session and 529 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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