If you wish to capture the contents of the Terminal window on OS X, e.g., if you are running the top command and would like to capture a snapshot of what is in the terminal window, but would like to have that information in text format, rather than as an image file, which is what you would get if you used Preview and chose "File" and then "Take Screen Shot", you can use Command-S from the Terminal window. You will be prompted as to where you wish to save the file; the default file name is
Terminal Saved Output in the Documents folder for
the account you are logged in under. When you choose "Save", if the file
exists, you will see the message below:
"Terminal Saved Output" already exists.
A file or folder with the same name already exists in the folder Documents. Replacing it will overwrite its current contents.
Cancel Replace
If you choose "Replace" the contents of the current Terminal tab will be written to the file, including the scrollback buffer, i.e., all of the information displayed in the window for the current Terminal tab, even what is not shown on the screen unless you scroll upwards, is recorded to the file.
So, if I wanted to capture the current output of top -o cpu,
I could hit the Command and S keys to save the displayed
information and then edit out anything from the scrollback buffer to have
something like what is shown below.
$ top -o cpu Processes: 147 total, 7 running, 3 stuck, 137 sleeping, 831 threads 22:35:37 Load Avg: 3.28, 3.22, 3.24 CPU usage: 84.86% user, 15.13% sys, 0.0% idle SharedLibs: 484K resident, 0B data, 0B linkedit. MemRegions: 147433 total, 1663M resident, 37M private, 558M shared. PhysMem: 849M wired, 1613M active, 1597M inactive, 4059M used, 36M free. VM: 318G vsize, 1026M framework vsize, 33663121(1) pageins, 8539859(0) pageouts Networks: packets: 19460598/11G in, 27466428/5435M out. Disks: 19736694/473G read, 9899513/434G written. PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #WQ #PORT #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE 215 firefox 83.9 308 hrs 71/1 3 428+ 90860- 967M- 82M 1143M- 27 opendirector 66.7 61:34:17 12/1 12/1 709 229 3780K 1936K 7116K 33110 top 21.3 00:02.19 1/1 0 24 33 1904K 216K 2652K 124 WindowServer 12.6 15:23:27 4/1 1 738+ 23303+ 15M- 172M+ 141M+ 213 Terminal 6.0 09:50.46 10 5 214 933+ 16M+ 12M+ 35M+ 13601 Preview 5.4 01:11.19 3 1 661 2642+ 45M- 69M+ 86M+ 0 kernel_task 2.5 06:57:45 87/2 0 2 851 30M 0B 461M+ 29265- Microsoft En 1.4 12:06:51 14 3 440 2139 100M 65M 163M 55 hidd 0.6 27:51.88 5/1 3/1 92 67 620K 312K 1788K 15258- Microsoft Po 0.3 73:07.63 5 3 188 986 12M 36M 33M 221- Microsoft Wo 0.3 01:54:36 5 3 155 963 31M 45M 57M 229- My Day 0.2 01:46:08 6 1 167 447- 13M- 33M 36M- 210- Microsoft Ex 0.1 77:31.36 5 3 206 2356 58M 93M 101M 68- dsAccessServ 0.1 51:10.38 14 3 152 204 1456K 1764K 6032K 71- LANrev Agent 0.0 27:48.38 13 2 242+ 90+ 2540K+ 1932K 2912K+ 69 SymDaemon 0.0 05:33:54 16 1 1187 434 18M 2568K 26M 651 java 0.0 26:11.37 20 1 274 331 17M 4196K 20M 10267 VMware Fusio 0.0 03:59.72 9 1 265 529 3900K 17M 13M 613- Microsoft Da 0.0 64:23.94 3 1 106 239 76M 22M 93M
