Ny way to convert a putty “All session output” log, with control characters, to a more human readable “Printable output” log

commandcommand-line-interfaceputty

We had a contractor in-house to help with some configuration of a product and we're trying to look through the putty logs he set up for us, but instead of using "printable output" he used "all session output" which includes every keystroke including "BS", etc. making the logs very difficult to read as he had many, many typos. ie:

[ESC]]0;root@host:~[BEL][root@host ~]# itm,cm[BS][BS][ESC][K[BS][ESC][Kcmd agent starp[BS]t

Is there some way to strip these control characters out, intelligently, so that the end result is a human readable file much like what you'd see in "printable output" format?

Thank you for the below suggestion. Our major painpoint is the [BS] control characters, which would turn this:

ls -pg[BS][BS]al P[BS]| greu[BS]p dr

into:

ls -al | grep dr

Any idea how that could be accomplished?

Best Answer

Enable a very large scrollback in putty, cat the log file, and copy and paste the result into a new file.

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How to programmatically convert putty logs to human-readable, searchable files

Assuming the escape codes in the putty file are in binary(im a little confused why your example has control characters - im guessing less did that), you can try col

http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/col.1.html

The control sequences for carriage motion that col understands and their decimal values are listed in the following table:

          ESC-7             reverse line feed (escape then 7)
          ESC-8             half reverse line feed (escape then 8)
          ESC-9             half forward line feed (escape then 9)
          backspace         moves back one column (8); ignored in the
                            first column
          newline           forward line feed (10); also does carriage
                            return
          carriage return   (13)
          shift in          shift to normal character set (15)
          shift out         shift to alternate character set (14)
          space             moves forward one column (32)
          tab               moves forward to next tab stop (9)
          vertical tab      reverse line feed (11)