Bash – Search History Across Multiple Screen Windows

Based on the answer to the comment up above, it appears your are overriding TERM in one of your startup scripts. While inside screen, your TERM should be set to 'screen', not 'xterm-256color'.

I would look through your shell startup scripts. ~/.bashrc, /etc/bash/bashrc, and possibly others like ~/.bash_profile and /etc/profile depending on how you have everything set up. If you see any TERM="..." settings, you need to remove those.

Screen does keep a log of past output lines; it's called the “scrollback history buffer” in the Screen documentation.

To navigate through the scrollback, press C-a ESC (copy). You can use the arrow and PgUp/PgDn keys to navigate, as well as other keys to search and copy text. Press ESC to exit scrollback/copy mode.

By default, Screen only keeps 100 lines' worth. Put a defscrollback directive in your .screenrc to change this figure.

If you want a complete log from your script, save it in a file. Run it inside Screen to be able to connect back to the parent shell and easily see if the script is still running, suspend and restart it, etc. Or fork it off with nohup. To monitor the log file while it's growing, use tail -f.