Arch Linux

blackhole

Member

From: Karlsruhe, Germany

Registered: 2008-12-14

Posts: 148

Website

How to increase the number of scrollable shell/terminal lines?

Hi guys,

I've just run "pacman -Syu" and got hundreds of error lines. When I tried to scroll up to the first one by pressing "shift-pageup" I noticed, that I could only go back a couple of lines. So apparently my terminal "forgot" the first few lines.

How can I increase the number of "history lines" (no, I do not mean the bash command history) in my terminal? I'm not using any terminal emulator like xterm. I have no GUI installed on that box. It's just the normal virtual console I'm talking about.

Thanks a lot in advance,
Blackhole

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dschrute

Member

From: NJ, USA

Registered: 2007-04-09

Posts: 183

Re: How to increase the number of scrollable shell/terminal lines?

From what I've read, the standard config uses your vga card's memory, and is pretty limited in how much it can be changed.  I have seen it sugested that using less virtual consoles might give you more of a scrollback, but I can't confirm that.

There is also a somewhat new option with 2.6 kernels for "Soft Scrolback" that uses system RAM rather than VGA ram.  This is a kernel, compile time option so if it isn't enabled by default in Arch, you'd have to recompile your kernel with it turned on.  Google "console soft scrollback" or VGACON_SOFT_SCROLLBACK for more info.

blackhole

Member

From: Karlsruhe, Germany

Registered: 2008-12-14

Posts: 148

Website

Re: How to increase the number of scrollable shell/terminal lines?

From what I've read, the standard config uses your vga card's memory, and is pretty limited in how much it can be changed.  I have seen it sugested that using less virtual consoles might give you more of a scrollback, but I can't confirm that.

There is also a somewhat new option with 2.6 kernels for "Soft Scrolback" that uses system RAM rather than VGA ram.  This is a kernel, compile time option so if it isn't enabled by default in Arch, you'd have to recompile your kernel with it turned on.  Google "console soft scrollback" or VGACON_SOFT_SCROLLBACK for more info.

Thanks a lot. I didn't expect it to be so difficult. I thought there would be some config file somewhere. Can't the shell/bash itself do the soft scrollback out of the box?

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dschrute

Member

From: NJ, USA

Registered: 2007-04-09

Posts: 183

Re: How to increase the number of scrollable shell/terminal lines?

You can use the screen program, which has better options for scrollback, or redirect output to a file for later viewing. 
My guess is the scrollback buffer is limited because you do have those other options.

BoppreH

Member

Registered: 2009-02-04

Posts: 47

Re: How to increase the number of scrollable shell/terminal lines?

I think you can redirect the output to some text file to read later.

command >> output.txt

It's not perfect, but it's easier.

moljac024

Member

From: Serbia

Registered: 2008-01-29

Posts: 2,676

Re: How to increase the number of scrollable shell/terminal lines?

I can also recommend you start using gnu screen

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skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: How to increase the number of scrollable shell/terminal lines?

You got hundreds of error messages? Did the work klibc appear a bunch of times? If so:

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=56431