Save past GNU screen output to a file
One way to do it is to use copy mode to copy the entire scrollback history, then dump it into a file. (There is likely a better way.)
With default keybindings, this would be something like:
- Ctrl-A to send screen a command
[
to enter copy modeg
to go to the top- Space bar to mark the beginning of the scrollback buffer (where you are) as the start of the text to be copied
G
to go to the end- Enter to mark the end of the text to be copied, and copy it.
Then open up vim, run :set paste
to avoid issues with e.g. auto-indentation, and then use Ctrl-A
]
to paste.
You can use hardcopy -h
command to save the contents of the current scroll buffer
to a file. As described in man screen
:
hardcopy [-h] [file] Writes out the currently displayed image to the file file, or, if no filename is specified, to hardcopy.n in the default directory, where n is the number of the current window. This either appends or overwrites the file if it exists. See below. If the option -h is specified, dump also the contents of the scrollback buffer.
You said:
I estimate it to be below 5000 lines.
5000 lines is really a lot. The default length of scroll buffer in
screen
is just 100, not ~5000 lines. Unless you started your
screen
session with a larger scroll buffer setting it will not be
possible to retrieve all ~5000 lines of the scroll buffer.