Terminal window scrollback is saved somewhere?

A history of the commands is saved to a file but the ouput from commands is destroyed. You could save your terminal session with commands and output as a text file. Assuming that your shell is bash then you would create and applescript (osascript) in your .bash_logout to create the file.

I think with the more recent versions of Mac OS X, an application that is being quit, will have its memory saved so that when it is restarted, it can be restored from the same memory so that it looks just like you left it. However, I do not think it there is a separate file. And I'm willing to bet that the saved memory is not something easy to parse just to get the scrollback history out of it.

Then again, if the unlimited scrollback history is checked, I think that IS saved somewhere. However, I know from experience, and the experience of others, that when that unlimited saved scrollback history gets "HUGE", the Terminal performance starts to get really REALLY BAD.

Finally, there is a Terminal -> Shell -> Export Text As... which can be used to save the scrollback history to a file of your choosing.

I'm assuming that your account is configured with the standard shell /bin/bash

Under Terminal, if you type the command: history

You get a numbred list of the previous commands entered.

You can get a similar result with the command: cat ~/.bash_history

the contents of .bash_history remains after exiting Terminal.

There is an alternative terminal app called "iTerm" which has a handy Log option under it's Shell menu which logs your current session for a file of your choice. There are many other features iTerm has so I suggest you take a look.

The history of your Bash shell commands is kept in ~/.bash_history.

If you want to capture your terminal session and the output from commands, there are a copy of approaches:

1. Pipe your command to tee(1)
   1. ls -lt | tee myls.log # display on screen and write (overwrite) content to log file
   2. ls -lt | tee -a myls.log # display on screen and write (append) content to log file
2. Use script(1) to interactively capture command output to logfile
   1. script -t 15 mycmd.log ls -lt
   2. script -t 15 mysession.log
      1. This starts a new capture shell, writes output to the specified logfile
      2. End script session with control-D.

Dear VikingOSX,

I created an account and logged in just so say Thanks! The info you gave is golden! In Terminal I tiped open ~/.bash_history and the entire history of anything I've ever typed in Terminal was there. I edited removing mistakes and what I didn't need (as sometimes I need to scrollback and remember the command I used for specific operations) so that is a small "memorandum" id commands if you will.

Once again thanks so much for the useful info provided! 🙂

S.Fanara wrote:

Dear VikingOSX,

I created an account and logged in just so say Thanks! The info you gave is golden! In Terminal I tiped open ~/.bash_history and the entire history of anything I've ever typed in Terminal was there. I edited removing mistakes and what I didn't need (as sometimes I need to scrollback and remember the command I used for specific operations) so that is a small "memorandum" id commands if you will.

Once again thanks so much for the useful info provided! 🙂

The history command is history. For instance:

history

history | grep -i cat

You can also use the recall operator and related — all of this is part of how bash works.