Ubuntu – How to see a history of the terminal output, not just commands entered

If the output produced by your scripts is very important to you (to look for error, warning, actions that were run and so on), then you shouldn't rely on the display of the console you're using.

You have to redirect the output of your scripts to some files, this has advantages :

• you are no more bounded to the number of lines in the scroll buffer of the console you are using
• you can archive the result for as long as you want to be able to retrieve what was done, even some days/weeks/months after you effectively run the script
• you can have the errors logged to a dedicated file, different from the informational messages, making it more easy to find errors. (if the commands used in your scripts send error to STDERR and information to STDOUT).
• you can even log to a file while still displaying output on the terminal is you use the command tee.

So, you can do this :

./script.sh | tee -a output

to copy all the output of script.sh to a file called output, appending the text to the end of the file and displaying the text on the terminal too.

There is a set of shortcuts for terminal , and they are organized around the current cursor position.

• You can use CtrlK shortcut to cut the text from cursor to end of line
• CtrlU cuts from current position to beginning of line.
• Paste with CtrlY

These two are pretty useful in particular when you want to either copy the command or its arguments.

If you are proficient with vim text editor, you can edit the command you want in a more powerful way by evoking vim with fc command.

For using the command outside the terminal, you might want to use xclip command (not installed by default) . For instance,

$ echo "some_command" | xclip -sel clip

Once you have xclip you can add the following function to your .bashrc file

to_clipboard() {
    xclip -sel clip <<<"$@" 
} 

What this does is it will copy whatever you put in front to clip board. You can use that in combination with the shortcuts above to cut test, paste it in front of the function, and it will be added to your clipboard. Small example

$ to_clipboard echo 'hello world'