Hello,

As part of my effort to learn more about console tools, I have installed Fedora Core 5 with no graphical elements. My question is, can I "scroll up" in a plain Bash login screen? I know about piping output to less, but that's not always possible (or I may not know about it -- after all, that's why I'm posting). For instance, I ran yum update, which displayed a huge list of package needing update. Naturally, this did not fit in 25 lines. Can I, in this case, see previous output?

As a side question, do you think my choice is right? Graphical interfaces just distract me and pretty soon I would end up using them exclusively, thus nulling my quest to learn console tools. I can use Vim and Elinks acceptably, and in my view it's a good start: I can search the web and manually edit configuration files.

Thanks and congrats on the community,
Vlad

Use <Shift>+<Page Up> and <Shift>+<Page Down>. Unfortunately, the amount you will be able to see will still be limited.

You might like to take a look at the 'screen' utility if you really love the command line. It does all sorts of wonderful things.

You can also direct output of a process to a text file to review later, eg: However, you won't see the text output while the first process is running. Not sure if you can direct output to the screen at the same time.

You can view the output and write to a file at the same time using tee:
Notice that this will only capture standard output. Error messages will not be directed to these files. To do all messages to update.log:

All of your advice was interesting and useful. Thank you kindly.