Bug#400725: release-notes: How to view logs generated by 'script'?

[Nikolaus Schulz <microschulz@web.de>]

On Tue, Nov 28, 2006 at 04:31:35PM +0100, Nikolaus Schulz wrote:
> IMO there really should exist a utility to strip such ANSI control
> sequences.  The best I've found so far is a small program by James
> Carlson, see the usenet thread "VT100 to text utility" at [1].  

Hm, sorry, I should have noted that this utility (which the author
christened 'novt') isn't enough here, because it is limited to filtering
out vt100 control sequences; but the attached bash snippet from my ~/bin
completes the job nicely. 

> Hmm, Joey, do you think something like this would qualify for moreutils?
> 
> Nikolaus
> 
> [1] http://groups.google.com/group/comp.terminals/msg/1fdc79377950d045

Nikolaus

#!/bin/bash
# 
# unscript: clean up typescripts. 
# 'novt' is by James Carlson. 
# sed/tr pipeline from a ksh script by Robert Katz.
# (No, 'col -b' doesn't do it.)

B=$'\b'
novt "$@" |
sed " 
    :x 
    s/[^$B]$B// 
    t x" | 
tr -dc '[:print:]\t\n'