GNU screen: print a detached session to stdout

Question

I just want to have a quick overview of my detached GNU screen sessions. Is it possible to dump the current content to stdout ? Something like

screen --print SESSION_NAME > file.txt

Answer 1

You can dump one window of a screen session with screen -X hardcopy /some/file, that will save a screen dump of the current window in /some/file.

You can dump a specific window with:

screen -X at 3 hardcopy /some/file

And all of them in a single file with:

screen -X eval 'harcopy_append on' 'at \\# hardcopy /some/file'

You can also dump one file per window, by specifying which directory to dump them in (if you don't specify it, then they'll be dumped in the directory screen was started in) with

screen -X eval 'hardcopydir /some/dir' 'at \\# hardcopy'

(will be dumped in files called hardcopy.<n>)

See the -h option of hardcopy to include the scroll buffer.

Use screen's -S option as usual to specify the session to run the command in.

Answer 2

Start screen with the -L option to enable logging of the session.

Alternatively, after you have launched screen, you can turn logging of a window in the screen session on and off with CTRLa-H.

The logs will be created in your current working directory with the name screenlog.X where X is a unique number.

The output of the windowlist when logging is enabled has an L in the Flags column.

Num Name           Flags
  0 fedora         $(L)               
  1 sudo           $                                        
  2 fedora         $(L)