How Can I Capture Output From Programs That Use curses?

Question

For example, the pv utility shows me the current rate of data transfer and updates every second. I'd like to save that output to a file, so that I can see at what rate data was being transferred second by second. I can't use a simple redirect like (pv /dev/zero > /dev/null) 2> out.txt.

Answer 1

Use screen, which provides a kind of virtual text terminal. When you run a program like pv from within screen (by typing screen pv), you can save a snapshot of the screen with Control-a, h.