command linegnome-terminal
Does an elegant way exist to save the output of a command to a file after the command has been run, while the terminal window is open i.e. once the command has been executed in the terminal?
The output is still present in terminal. Now I could copy & paste all the lines and save it to a file.
But perhaps does a method exist to somehow write the output buffer of a terminal window to a file or even better the output of an already executed command?
GNOME Terminal has the above functionalities.
In case you didn't know, in most terminal emulators:
Simple, GTK+ pop-up terminal - https://github.com/lanoxx/tilda
GTK+ popup terminal. Great multi-monitor support. - https://github.com/Guake/guake
Check out Yakuake for a Qt/KDE alternative.
Feature rich terminal using the EFL toolkit. https://www.enlightenment.org/about-terminology
That's tee you're searching for.
ls -l | tee outfile
prints the output of ls -l to stdout (i.e. the terminal) and saves it in the file outfile at the same time. But: It doesn't write the command name neither to stdout nor to the file. To achieve that, just echo the command name before running the command and pipe both outputs to tee:
( echo "ls -l" && ls -l ) | tee outfile
That's cumbersome to type, so why not define a function?
both(){ ( echo "$@" && "$@" ) | tee outfile ;}
After that you can just run
both ls -l
to get the desired result. Put the function in your ~/.bashrc to have it defined in every new terminal.
If you want to be able to specify the output file as the first argument like in
both output ls -l
instead make it:
both(){ ( echo "${@:2}" && "${@:2}" ) | tee "$1" ;}
If you don't want the output file to be overwritten but rather append to it, add the -a option to tee.
Best Answer
You appear to have a number of options, but gnome-terminal doesn't support logging to a file by itself.
You can run the
scriptcommand before your output in order to accomplish this. See this Launchapd Q&A for more.You can install and use a different terminal instead of gnome-terminal, which supports logging all output to a file, such as Putty. There may be others.
You can simply highlight the text output you require, then use CTRL-SHIFT-C to copy the text.