How can I read what is written to /dev/tty*
(*
= 0
– number of tty)?
I tried sudo tail -f /dev/tty1
on one terminal(X
) and then sudo cp .emacs /dev/tty1
from another. X
didn't show the the content of .emacs
but pressing Ctrl-Alt-F1 I could see the content of the .emacs
.
Is this question of the same category as this?
Best Answer
On Linux, you can dump the current text that is displayed on a text mode console through the vcs devices. For example,
cat /dev/vcs1
dumps the content of/dev/tty1
. The vcsa devices (e.g./dev/vcsa1
) contain text attributes as well.Every time you open
/dev/vcsNUM
, you get the current content of the terminal's display buffer. This isn't an interface to what is currently being printed to the terminal — there's no such interface.For pseudo-terminals, what is currently displayed is tracked by the terminal emulator, and there is no way to dump it unless the terminal emulator provides one. For example, for a pseudo-terminal provided by ssh, the terminal content would be on the client machine.