How to Capture Output From Programs That Use curses

cursespv

For example, the pv utility shows me the current rate of data transfer and updates every second. I'd like to save that output to a file, so that I can see at what rate data was being transferred second by second. I can't use a simple redirect like (pv /dev/zero > /dev/null) 2> out.txt.

Best Answer

Use screen, which provides a kind of virtual text terminal. When you run a program like pv from within screen (by typing screen pv), you can save a snapshot of the screen with Control-a, h.