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Change The Current Text Console Using chvt

You all know you can change from one text console to another using ALT-Fx, where x is a number from 1 to 7 (or even higher, depending on your configuration).

What is not so widely known, is that you can also change consoles with a nifty little program called chvt.

Example: chvt 3 (this switches to console 3)

There are several reasons why this utility can be quite handy: First, you might want to write shell/perl/whatever scripts which switch the consoles, which you can do now. Second, if something with your X11 keyboard configuration screws up (e.g. ALT-keys don't work anymore) or something similar, you can still switch to a console.

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Mon, 2007-11-19 23:01 — Anonymous (not verified)

yes, but can you do this...?

Does anyone know a way to determine the "currently active" virtual terminal? As in the one currently being displayed on the console. I'd be terribly interested in being able to do that.

Wed, 2010-06-09 10:34 — Anonymous (not verified)

running fgconsole as root

running fgconsole as root will tell you the current active VT.

Tue, 2007-11-20 03:03 — Uwe Hermann

tty

Sure, just run tty, that prints the current terminal.

Mon, 2009-11-30 13:42 — Anonymous (not verified)

that does not answer the

that does not answer the question !

Sat, 2005-09-17 20:35 — Anonymous (not verified)

Another useful thing

Another useful thing you can do with chvt?

You can "wake up" sleeping monitors. If you were running a lab, for example, you can set up a simple cron job that goes

chvt 1 !!
chvt 7 !!

and boom, all the working computers wake up at the same time.

Sun, 2011-05-29 16:46 — bandie (not verified)

and if you could not access

and if you could not access the local computer's terminal (eg. Xorg freezed and ctrl-alt-f1 does no effect) you can use ssh+conspy at a remote machine!

$ ssh blocked-host
# conspy 1 # may needs root privileges
[login]
$ chvt 1; chvt 7
[esc][esc][esc]

Sun, 2005-09-18 15:44 — Uwe Hermann

chvt

Nice hack ;) Thanks for sharing. Uwe.