Hi Brian, Thanks ever so much for your explanation. Once again I seem to be turning normality on its head. It's usually the more advanced things that come easy to me, yet the simple fundamentals elude me, hehe.
Anyway, script it is. I can always manually (or why not push the boat out and do it automated?) remove any junk later on. Thanks again, H. Find me on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/p/Hussein_Patwa/510013486 > Subject: Re: Logging all console activity to a text file > > Hussein Patwa wrote: > > > Thanks for your very detailed post. I'm no Unix guru so I'll be > > honest and say some of that wasn't entirely clear to me. It seems > > that, as what I'm doing with cygwin is really pretty basic > > (compressing/decompressing, subversion operations, ssh operations, > > etc), trying a different shell like xterm as you mentioned > may be the > > best and simplest bet. I doubt at this stage of learning > I'd even notice the difference. > > I think you're confusing the concept of a shell with the > concept of a terminal. They work together, but they're > independent parts. > > The shell is the program that interprets what you type at a > prompt. Its job is to do things like find where on the PATH > the program is located and invoke it, expand wildcards into a > list of matching filenames, redirect input or output if you > typed "<" or ">", etc. The shell has nothing to do with the > physical window that you see on your screen, and in fact in > many cases the shell runs with no terminal at all, such as > when it's given a script file to execute with input and > output redirected, or when it's running a cron job, etc. > > Bash is the default Cygwin shell, but there are alternative > shells such as tcsh, zsh, csh, ksh, ash, etc. The Windows > native shell is cmd.exe. > > The terminal is the thing that displays characters on the > screen, and interprets keystrokes from the operating system, > translating them into escape sequences that are parsed by > whatever is reading input. The terminal doesn't know anything > about what is running inside it, it's just a device that > prints characters to a rectangular box and sends keystroke > sequences. You can have a terminal with no shell, such as > when you invoke a program directly and it prints to stdout. > > The default Cygwin terminal is a Windows Console, and so it's > Windows that draws the box, displays the characters, scrolls > the screen, etc. > Alternative terminals are rxvt and xterm. > > As you can see what most people might call a "Cygwin prompt" > or "shell prompt" or a "shell" is really a combination of a > shell and a terminal. > You can mix and match from the above list in any combination: > The default is bash with a Windows Console, but you can use bash+rxvt, > bash+xterm, zsh+Windows Console, zsh+xterm, and on and on. If you > switched your terminal from a Windows Console to xterm you > would still be using bash, unless you changed that too. > People seem to think that because they click on that Cygwin > icon and the "cygwin.bat" just runs "bash.exe --login" that > the box they see on the screen is drawn and controlled by > bash, but that's not really true. The operating system > provides that console to bash, which is why it looks exactly > like the console from a standard Windows Command Prompt. > > Anyway, using 'script' is really much more simple than > switching to xterm, which is an X11 app which requires > installing an X11 server, etc. Install the util-linux > package, and from the prompt type "script filename". Now > everything typed and output is written to filename, until you > type exit. > > Brian > > -- > Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple > Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html > Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html > FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ > > -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
