How do you scroll inside a guested RHEL Linux command window?

[DaveAtWork]

Hi Workstation pro community,

• Using VMware Workstation Pro 12.5  “how do I scroll in a guested RHEL Linux console command window?
• This is not a new build where I can use the GNU graphics, this is a VM guest COTS build, so it is "as-is".
• The visible work window, contains only 20 lines with no scroll-back buffer. I literally need to be able to scroll back around 250 -500 lines.”.

The searching I've done at this forum seems to suggest I cannot create a nice "scrolling xterm window out of this command window"...

{background}

I'm running a COTS installer (bash), which doesn't run out of the box as billed.  Its rather complex COTS logic, error handling uses /dev/null.  So it is difficult to re-direct all the output using standard  cmd-line <> into a file or or | through "more/less".

So I'm hoping that a little -nxv in the top of the bash and turning on scrolling will allow me to debug this beast.

thanks in advance.

[DaveAtWork]

A colleague of mine suggested using the command "screen with a buffer#" which emulates a vt-100 console. e.g.  cmdshell> screen 200 , that works.

from the man pages

"Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes (typically interactive shells). Each virtual terminal provides the functions of a DEC VT100 terminal and, in addition, several control functions from the ISO 6429 (ECMA 48, ANSI X3.64) and ISO 2022 standards (e.g. insert/delete line and support for multiple character sets). There is a scrollback history buffer for each virtual terminal and a copy-and-paste mechanism that allows moving text regions between windows."

For VMware 12.5 Pro this is a sufficient solution for my needs.