Manpages - screendump.1

screendump - dump the contents of a virtual console to stdout

screendump [ N ]

The screendump command dumps the contents of virtual console N , (or the current console if N is omitted) to standard out.

Just saying

cat /dev/vcsN

has a similar effect.

For security reasons, screendump uses linux devices "virtual console screen" and "virtual console screen with attributes" to give access for screendump.

Ensure these files exist, using

cd /dev for i in 0 1 2 3 …; do
mknod vcs$i c 7 $i
mknod vcsa$i c 7 `expr 128 + $i`
done

(filling in the ellipses) and give the device files appropriate permissions, or run screendump as root.

*setterm*(1)