Grabconsole grabconsole is a tool heavily based on xconsole that
grabs the system console and holds back in a file everything that gets written
to it. Then, when it catches a signal, it releases the system console
(so another process could open it for reading) and a few seconds
later, writes back in it everything it has read from it.
grabconsole, for example, can be used in order to have the
X server messages in a xconsole without interfering to a text
console with all its starting messages. To achieve this goal it is
sufficient to start grabconsole before the X server, and to
send an appropriate signal to it when xconsole is about to be
launched so the console is released.
Tested on Linux and FreeBSD. The archive includes a
sample setup for xdm to use it.