Man page 1 : screendump

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)