screendump (1) Linux Manual Page

screendump – dump the contents of a virtual console to stdout

Synopsis

screendump [ N ]

Description

The screendump command dumps the contents of virtual console N , (or the current console if N is omitted) to standard out.

Just saying

cat /dev/vcsN

has a similar effect.

Notes

For security reasons, screendump uses linux devices "virtual console screen" and "virtual console screen with attributes" to give access for screendump.

Ensure these files exist, using

cd /dev for i in 0 1 2 3 …; do
       mknod vcs$i c 7 $i

       mknod vcsa$i c 7 `expr 128 + $i`

done

(filling in the ellipses) and give the device files appropriate permissions, or run screendump as root.

See Also

setterm(1)