Get terminal contents

Question

Is it possible to get a snapshot of the text contents of a Linux terminal?

Both tput and terminfo support "cup" mode (e.g. tput smcup to start alternate buffer mode) which implies they must save the screen state somewhere. Is it possible to get these contents?

Answer 1

Four Methods to Take Screenshot Capture in Ubuntu Linux

1. Use Print Screen This is the most common method to take screenshots. Pressing the “Print Screen” button will take the screenshot of the “Entire Visible Screen”.

When we want to take a particular window, we can use “Alt+Print Screen”. Alt+PrintScreen will take only the particular window which is currently active.

2. Use gnome-screenshot gnome-screenshot utility is part of the GNOME Desktop Environment, which can also be used to take screenshot. It also has a command line mode (gnome-screenshot) From the command-line, just type the command “gnome-screenshot” to do the same. The command will take a screenshot and provide a dialog to save it.

$ gnome-screenshot

Capture Only the Current Window: From the UI, to take the screenshot of the current active window alone, select “Grab the Current Window” and click “Take Screenshot”.

From the command-line, use the -w option as follows to do the same.

$ gnome-screenshot -w

Take Screenshot After Some Delay: From the UI, you can also set a delay before taking the screenshots. Set the “Grab after a delay” to the required number of seconds. This will be really helpful when we need to take screen shots of navigation.

From the command-line, use -d option to do the same. -d 2 is used for delaying the screenshot for 2 seconds. So within the 2 seconds, we can make the window which we want to take screenshot as active.

$ gnome-screenshot -w -d 2

Capture a Particular Area: From the UI, if you want to take a particular rectangle area alone, then select “Grab a Particular area” and click “Take Screenshot”.

From the command-line, use the -a option to do the same. Once this command is entered, the mouse pointer will be changed, and you can drag and select which area to take screenshot.

$ gnome-screenshot -a

Take Screenshot Including or Excluding Window Border: From the UI, you can also include or exclude the window border by selecting/deselecting “Include the Window Border” option.

3. Use ImageMagic’s Import Command ImageMagick is an open source software suite for displaying, converting, and editing raster image files. It comes with various command line tools, and one of that is “import”. Now we will see, how we can use import to take screenshots. You can install it by using apt-get on debian/ubuntu as follows:

apt-get install imagemagick

Capture Entire Screen using -window root option Use the “-window root” option to take screenshot of the complete screen. The screenshot will be saved in the file name provided in the command line.

$ import -window root Pictures/Image5.png

ImageMagick supports more that 100 file types. You can use any one of them to store the output.

4. Use GIMP You can also take screenshot from gimp. Launch gimp, and click “File->Create->Screenshot”. A new dialog window will open with options similar to gnome-screenshot.

Answer 2

You can save a snapshot of the text contents of a Linux terminal to a file using GNU Screen hardcopy feature but only if you started screen beforehand. Apart from that, you can restore terminal contents saved with tput smcup using tput rmcup but this works only in xterm (not only in xterm terminal emulator itself but also in other terminal emulators providing that $TERM is set to xterm. It doesn't work in Linux TTY though).