Save current terminal scrollback to file?

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.

3 Answers

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)

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

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).