You want to run a long job on a remote box, detach from it, and reattach later. Reach for tmux or screen and you've just dragged in a terminal multiplexer with config files, status bars, copy modes, and a learning curve. What if all you wanted was the detach/reattach part?

abduco does exactly one thing: it runs a program in a detachable session. No panes, no windows, no .tmux.conf. About 600 lines of C by Marc André Tanner (also the author of dvtm and vis). It's been in Debian since wheezy and almost nobody uses it.

Start a session:

abduco -c mybuild ./long-running-build.sh

Press Ctrl-\ to detach. The build keeps running. List sessions:

$ abduco
Active   Created               Socket
*        2026-05-11 09:14:22   /home/shaun/.abduco/mybuild

Reattach from any terminal — your laptop, an SSH session, a serial console:

abduco -a mybuild

That's the entire interface. -c creates, -a attaches, -A creates-or-attaches, -n starts detached. There is no -h for help because the man page is shorter than tmux's keybinding cheatsheet.

Where it earns its keep:

• Pair it with dvtm or your shell. abduco -A work dvtm gives you the tmux feature set when you want it, plain detach when you don't. Composition over configuration.
• Scripted long jobs. CI runners, deploy scripts, migrations — wrap them in abduco -n jobname cmd and they survive SSH disconnects without a 50KB tmux config in your Ansible role.
• Embedded boxes. tmux pulls in libevent and ncurses. abduco needs neither. I've cross-compiled it for a 4MB OpenWrt router where tmux wouldn't fit.
• It survives the controlling terminal cleanly. Unlike nohup foo & or disown, you can reattach to the live stdin/stdout and watch a curses program redraw itself. Try that with nohup.

The killer feature is exit-code preservation. When the program inside finishes, abduco holds the session open with the exit status:

$ abduco -c test sh -c 'sleep 5; exit 42'
# detach with Ctrl-\, wait, then:
$ abduco -a test
abduco: test: session terminated with exit status 42

Compare to screen -dmS, which silently nukes the session and leaves you wondering whether your nightly backup actually succeeded.

The read-only attach trick. abduco -Ar name attaches read-only — useful for letting a colleague watch your debugging session without giving them keyboard control. Cleaner than tmux's attach -r because there's no risk of accidentally hitting a prefix key and reconfiguring something.

Install:

apt install abduco         # Debian/Ubuntu
brew install abduco        # macOS
# or build from source — it's a single Makefile

When NOT to use it: if you actually want split panes, status bars, or session-shared clipboards, use tmux. abduco is the right answer when you've been using tmux purely as "the thing that lets me detach," which — let's be honest — is 80% of tmux users.