Search text in command output on a PuTTY terminal

You can also right click the title bar at the top of the window and select Copy All to Clipboard, then paste into a text editor and use that to search.

The Ctrl + a + [ is meant for use within the application screen (an app for multiplexing consoles).

less

Generally the easiest method to do this is to use tools such as less and to pipe the output from whatever application is generating the messages on the console, and search within the application less. You can do so using the forward slash (/) followed by whatever string you're searching for. Hit return to execute the search.

Example

$ less filename.log

...then in less, type a forward slash followed by string to search, foo

grep

In the same vain as above with using less, you can also use tools such as tail to print the lats few lines of a applications log file messages, and also use grep to search for only lines that contain a matching string/pattern.

$ grep "somestring" filename.log