retrieve logcat after a system crash Is it possible to retrieve a logcat from before a system crash after the phone recovers?  I.e. my phone is running normally, then it crashes and reboots, and I want to view the logs when it recovers to try to determine what caused the crash.  I can't find any way to view logcat in anything other than realtime, except to have a terminal emulator running and execute logcat -f logcat.txt V, then just leave it running forever.  That could build up a massive file that eats up all my storage.

I can't believe there's no way to view a crash report, I just can't figure out how.
Unfortunately logcat does not survive a hard reboot because the logs are stored in circular buffers in memory, and are never actually written to storage.  Your solution to leave a terminal session running may work, but as you said may grow the file uncontrollably, and during a reboot it may corrupt the output file.  I would suggest adding the -r and -n switches so that only the most recent entries are written:

logcat -r 1024 -n 10 -f /sdcard/logcat.txt &amp;


This limits the logs to 10 files named "logcat.txt", "logcat.txt.2", etc., each 1MB in size.  When that limit is reached, it will overwrite the first file, and so on.

You may also want to look into /proc/last_kmsg file, which stores kernel logs just prior to the last reboot.  Use cat /proc/last_kmsg &gt; /sdcard/last_kmsg.txt command to write its contents to a file on your storage.