17. The Message Line

screen displays informational messages and other diagnostics in a message line at the bottom of the screen. If your terminal has a status line defined in its termcap, screen will use this for displaying its messages, otherwise the last line of the screen will be temporarily overwritten and output will be momentarily interrupted. The message line is automatically removed after a few seconds delay, but it can also be removed early (on terminals without a status line) by beginning to type.

17.1 Using the message line from your program
17.2 Hardware Status Line		Use the terminal's hardware status line.
17.3 Display Last Message		Redisplay the last message.
17.4 Message Wait		Control how long messages are displayed.