Linux – Increase buffer size while running screen

ccze uses the curses output mode by default. (n)curses is a screen drawing library typically used by fullscreen applications. It switches to the terminal emulator's so-called "alternate screen" which does not have a scrollbar buffer, and the contents of the other, "normal screen" is restored upon exit.

Instead of this, you should use its ansi output format which is enabled by any of the -A, --raw-ansi, -m ansi or --mode=ansi command line options.

I'm not sure where to find it documented, but digging into the source a bit gives some clues. When you pass in -h it sets the histheight (see screen.c). In main it parses -h as follows:

case 'h':
    if (--argc == 0)
        exit_with_usage(myname, NULL, NULL);
    nwin_options.histheight = atoi(*++argv);
    if (nwin_options.histheight < 0)
        exit_with_usage(myname, "-h: %s: negative scrollback size?", *argv);
    break;

The nwin_options struct is an instance of NewWindow which is defined in window.h:

struct NewWindow {
    int StartAt;    /* where to start the search for the slot */
    char    *aka;       /* aka string */
    char    **args;     /* argv vector */
    char    *dir;       /* directory for chdir */
    char    *term;      /* TERM to be set instead of "screen" */
    bool    aflag;
    bool    dynamicaka;
    int flowflag;
    int lflag;
    int histheight;
    int monitor;
    int wlock;      /* default writelock setting */
    int silence;
    bool    wrap;
    bool    Lflag;      /* logging */
    int slow;       /* inter character milliseconds */
    int gr;
    bool    c1;
    int bce;
    int encoding;
    char    *hstatus;
    char    *charset;
    int poll_zombie_timeout;
};

where we can see that histheight is an int, so presumably the max value you can set it to is maxint for a signed int.