There is a machine i have remote superuser access to which i know has some interesting info on one of the VTs (/dev/tty2 in particular in this case). I can try to scare up someone physically on-site to plug in a monitor, and painfully transcribe the text there by hand, but i'd prefer the simpler, politer (and less error-prone) option of getting the data digitally myself via ssh.

Any ideas how i could find the text that is already displayed on that VT? The machine is running a stripped-down debian etch, but i could add packages if i need to.

More details: there was a local shell running on that VT, and the data that i'm interested in is the output of a process that had been run from that shell but is now terminated. So it's not in system logs or anything. I think just connecting to /dev/tty2 (with, say, cat) would give me only new text emitted on that console. But i want the stuff that's already been output.

I figure the data must be stored in RAM someplace, so it should be accessible somehow (unless it's maybe only in video RAM -- then i'd be less sure of being able to find it). Thanks for any suggestions!