Is it possible to use the 'screen' command to work with files on an encrypted home directory?

Question

So I have an encrypted home directory, set up during install on a server running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I attempted to use screen in order to run a script that accesses the data in my home directory after closing my ssh connection to this server, but ran into errors seemingly stemming from disk access.

Is this because leaving screen running doesn't constitue staying logged in to the machine, and thus the files in my home directory will be unreachable by any program using screen due to it being unmounted and thus not decrypted? (And is it thus akin to running a cron job that uses encrypted files?).

If this hypothesis is true, what can I do to address this?

Answer 1

There is a file named /home/.ecryptfs/$USER/.ecryptfs/auto-umount which is used as a flag for umounting the encrypted partition whenever you don't have a login shell anymore.

You might want to remove this, or (untested!) try to create another session within screen (eg run sudo login and login with the same user, within screen, this should keep the number of login-shells above zero).

EDIT: ecryptfs use who to count the number of logins. If you feel like troubleshooting...