How to search any word in linux 'screen'

linux search terminal gnu-screen
Waqas picture Waqas · Mar 25, 2014 · Viewed 21.2k times · Source

I am going screen logs of devstack with following command. screen -x stack I find searching in screens very difficult. Currently I start copy mode with Ctrl A Esc and read all the logs, sometimes it is very irritating to go through all logs while searching for a single word.

Is there a good way for searching a word in screens?

from man screen I found 

    Searching:
     / Vi-like search forward.
     ? Vi-like search backward.
     C-a s Emacs style incremental search forward.
     C-r Emacs style reverse i-search.

but screens do not support vi-like forward search.

Answer

Ian Petts picture Ian Petts · Mar 25, 2014

Once you are in scrollback mode with Ctrl + A, ESC, you should be able to search backwards through the buffer as described in the manual.

So to search for the word "string", press Ctrl + A, ESC, enter ?string and press Enter. It will take you backwards through the buffer to the word string. Pressing N will go to the next match (backwards) in the buffer.

To search forwards, the cursor should be anywhere but the end of the buffer, then use /string to search down.

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