Yes, but if you're root, you could also peer into the terminal emulator's memory space itself, and see that, too. Or into their sshd process, and pull the plain

Yes, but if you're root, you could also peer into the terminal emulator's memory space itself, and see that, too. Or into their sshd process, and pull the plaintext out of that. You're root. You might also find the man pages wall(1) and write(1) (That's the terminal utility write, not the syscall write(2).) interesting. (Edit: well, actually, if you're SSH'd into a remote host, your terminal emulator is probably local, so you might not be able to see into its memory unless you're root locally, ofc.)