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NAME | DESCRIPTION | FILES | VERSIONS | EXAMPLES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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vcs(4) Kernel Interfaces Manual vcs(4)
vcs, vcsa - virtual console memory
/dev/vcs0 is a character device with major number 7 and minor
number 0, usually with mode 0644 and ownership root:tty. It
refers to the memory of the currently displayed virtual console
terminal.
/dev/vcs[1-63] are character devices for virtual console
terminals, they have major number 7 and minor number 1 to 63,
usually mode 0644 and ownership root:tty. /dev/vcsa[0-63] are the
same, but using unsigned shorts (in host byte order) that include
attributes, and prefixed with four bytes giving the screen
dimensions and cursor position: lines, columns, x, y. (x = y = 0
at the top left corner of the screen.)
When a 512-character font is loaded, the 9th bit position can be
fetched by applying the ioctl(2) VT_GETHIFONTMASK operation
(available since Linux 2.6.18) on /dev/tty[1-63]; the value is
returned in the unsigned short pointed to by the third ioctl(2)
argument.
These devices replace the screendump ioctl(2) operations of
ioctl_console(2), so the system administrator can control access
using filesystem permissions.
The devices for the first eight virtual consoles may be created
by:
for x in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8; do
mknod -m 644 /dev/vcs$x c 7 $x;
mknod -m 644 /dev/vcsa$x c 7 $[$x+128];
done
chown root:tty /dev/vcs*
No ioctl(2) requests are supported.
/dev/vcs[0-63]
/dev/vcsa[0-63]
Introduced with Linux 1.1.92.
You may do a screendump on vt3 by switching to vt1 and typing
cat /dev/vcs3 >foo
Note that the output does not contain newline characters, so some
processing may be required, like in
fold -w 81 /dev/vcs3 | lpr
or (horrors)
setterm -dump 3 -file /proc/self/fd/1
The /dev/vcsa0 device is used for Braille support.
This program displays the character and screen attributes under
the cursor of the second virtual console, then changes the
background color there:
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <sys/ioctl.h>
#include <linux/vt.h>
int
main(void)
{
int fd;
char *device = "/dev/vcsa2";
char *console = "/dev/tty2";
struct {unsigned char lines, cols, x, y;} scrn;
unsigned short s;
unsigned short mask;
unsigned char attrib;
int ch;
fd = open(console, O_RDWR);
if (fd < 0) {
perror(console);
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
if (ioctl(fd, VT_GETHIFONTMASK, &mask) < 0) {
perror("VT_GETHIFONTMASK");
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
(void) close(fd);
fd = open(device, O_RDWR);
if (fd < 0) {
perror(device);
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
(void) read(fd, &scrn, 4);
(void) lseek(fd, 4 + 2*(scrn.y*scrn.cols + scrn.x), SEEK_SET);
(void) read(fd, &s, 2);
ch = s & 0xff;
if (s & mask)
ch |= 0x100;
attrib = ((s & ~mask) >> 8);
printf("ch=%#03x attrib=%#02x\n", ch, attrib);
s ^= 0x1000;
(void) lseek(fd, -2, SEEK_CUR);
(void) write(fd, &s, 2);
exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}
ioctl_console(2), tty(4), ttyS(4), gpm(8)
This page is part of the man-pages (Linux kernel and C library
user-space interface documentation) project. Information about
the project can be found at
⟨https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/⟩. If you have a bug report
for this manual page, see
⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING⟩.
This page was obtained from the tarball man-pages-6.15.tar.gz
fetched from
⟨https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/⟩ on
2025-08-11. If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML
version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-
to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or
improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not
part of the original manual page), send a mail to
[email protected]
Linux man-pages 6.15 2025-05-17 vcs(4)
Pages that refer to this page: ioctl_console(2), tty(4)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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