Re^2: Wanted: humanly readable `script` output

[mrslopenk]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone, but there are a lot of other control characters besides the backspace. If you are at a unix terminal, try this:

script
ls
exit

Then look in typescript. You'll see what I mean. Actually, there is a semi-passable solution that does not involve perl:

TERM=dumb script
ls
exit
cat typescript | col -b > readable.txt

This seems to work as long as all the commands you type after script work on a dumb terminal. I was just wondering if perl had a more robust solution. I had a look at Term::Cap, but I fail to understand how to use it. I feel there must be a solution because, after all, I can see the very text I want on the terminal screen -- it's all right there! -- until my buffer size is reached. Usually copy/paste with the mouse from terminal to emacs works ok, but it didn't work the other night when I was compiling a kernel -- the output exceeded my buffer size.

[pc88mxer]

To capture the output of a kernel compile, why not just redirect the output?

make zImage... > compile-output 2>&1

Also, I usually put such commands in the background and tail the output file occasionally to see how things are going,

[mrslopenk]

Yes, that would have been a good idea. Still, I would like a transcript of both the commands I typed and the output.

Moreover, it would make the perl-kiddie in me quite happy if I could parse terminal control codes in my favorite language.

[mrslopenk]

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

open(FILE,"<","typescript") || die;
while (my $line=<FILE>) {
    $line=~s/.\x08//g;
    $line=~s/\p{IsC}//g;
    print "$line\n";
}
close(FILE);

This left behind a lot of funny things, which, to my eyes look like:

 [00m, [01;34m, [01;35m, [m]0;

characters.

[loris]

What is left looks like the colour control sequences for a fancy bash prompt. You might want to set the prompt to something humble with, say

export PS1='\u@\h\$ '

loris

[ikegami]

This seems to work as long as all the commands you type after script work on a dumb terminal. I was just wondering if perl had a more robust solution

How could removing terminal-specific control sequences be any more robust than not having them in the first place?

The next best solution would be to have some program which process's your terminal's control sequences to generated a flat file. However, emulating a devices is rather complex and error-prone (hardly robust), and you'll have to make some concession or another in order to handle text being overwritten.