Save current terminal scrollback to file?

Question

I have been looking for an answer to this and not finding anything which makes me think it's not possible but ...

Is it possible to save the current Gnome Terminal scrollback buffer to a file?

I know that I can do something like command > output.txt to redirect all output to a file, or command | tee output.txt to split the output to the terminal as well as to a file. What I am trying to do is capture this after the fact. I'd like to save the current terminal tab's scrollback contents to a file.

Answer 1

After a bit of playing around I've discovered that you can:

• triple-click the last line
• hit shift + home
• shift + click first line
• copy with ctrl + shift + c (or right-click > 'Copy')

Now paste it into a text file ...or, using xsel you can shove your clipboard into a new file by just popping open a new tab and doing:

xsel -o > out.txt

(To install xsel do sudo apt-get install xsel)

WARNING

An unlimited scrollback can get huge and attempting to select all of it for copying will be slow and could even exceed memory limits. See comments below.

Answer 2

script command is appropriate when you want to save a terminal session to a file and display it later. When you call script it launches your shell, and when you are done, just type in exit. Everything will be in typescript file unless you specify otherwise.

For instance,

xieerqi:$ echo "Hello, Karl Wilbur"
Hello, Karl Wilbur

xieerqi:$ date
2015年 10月 27日 星期二 11:38:15 MDT

xieerqi:$ df
Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1      115247656 80939384  28430924  75% /
none                   4        0         4   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev             2914832        4   2914828   1% /dev
tmpfs             585216     1100    584116   1% /run
none                5120        0      5120   0% /run/lock
none             2926072      328   2925744   1% /run/shm
none              102400       52    102348   1% /run/user

xieerqi:$ exit
Script done, file is typescript
xieerqi@eagle:~$ cat typescript 
Script started on 2015年10月27日 星期二 11时37分55秒

xieerqi:$ echo "Hello, Karl Wilbur"
Hello, Karl Wilbur

xieerqi:$ date
2015年 10月 27日 星期二 11:38:15 MDT

xieerqi:$ df
Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1      115247656 80939384  28430924  75% /
none                   4        0         4   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev             2914832        4   2914828   1% /dev
tmpfs             585216     1100    584116   1% /run
none                5120        0      5120   0% /run/lock
none             2926072      328   2925744   1% /run/shm
none              102400       52    102348   1% /run/user

xieerqi:$ exit

Script done on 2015年10月27日 星期二 11时38分18秒

There may be control characters in the typescript file though ,such as from the ls comand, so use cat typescript | col -b > outputfile.txt command to redirect clean output to file

Answer 3

You can do this after the fact as well. You're looking for Virtual Console Memory (man vcs contains more info and a couple of examples).

In your case, if you're is working on a virtual terminal trough /dev/tty1, the following snippet will let you store the backlog in a file output-file:

cat /dev/vcs1 >output-file

Note that the device numbers of tty1 and vcs1 match.

Edit: I should note that this only works for virtual terminals and not for pseudo terminals (pseudo terminals are used to implement terminal emulators like gnome-terminal, xterm etc see man pts for more info).