How to take backup of a shell?

Question

I was working on a shell and got some weird exceptions in my program.

Just as a reference, I want to save all that is there on my shell to a text file. I do not just want the command history but also all the results that those commands produced at the shell.

Is there some built-in utility to do this? I have kept the shell open for now, so that I can take the backup. Also, I am using xterm and it does not allow selecting all the way upto the top of the shell, so the ultimate way is to take the backup one screen at a time. Any suggestions?

The shell looks like

Answer 1

I think script may be of some use here

http://linux.die.net/man/1/script

And xterm should have the ability to select al you want. I'd check your flags, including -sl NUMBER, -sb

Answer 2

To copy the whole window content, including the scrollback, select the last line (by dragging the left mouse button or by triple-clicking the left mouse button), then use the scroll bars to scroll to the top and right-click in the top left corner. Note that unlike the methods below, this will only show the final result as plain text: it won't show things that were displayed then erased, and it won't show colors and other formatting.

---

To avoid this in the future you can try this.

• Run your session inside script. Logging a shell session is script's goal in life.

• Run your session inside screen. It has several commands that can help you, including C-a h to write a “screenshot” into a file, and C-a H to start logging all subsequent output to a file.

• Some terminal emulators have a logging facility. In xterm, you can turn it on by checking “Log to File” in the Ctrl+left-mouse-button menu; all subsequent terminal output is logged. With the -l option, this is done for the whole session.