Hey guys, thanks for the replies. Much appreciated!

The sed command gave some strange results, and with the character locations not being preserved, I won't be able to find what I'm looking for in the file.

Thanks for the info on cat, but that just shows me what non-printing characters are in there and by removing the control chars it won't preserve how the text looks when printed using just 'cat filename.txt'....

I guess maybe this isn't possible..? I thought maybe it would be since the escape sequences are just re-arranging the text (*and inserting whitespace) and I can physically see how the formatted data SHOULD look when printed in the terminal. So I guess I kind of hoped I could just capture what is actually seen in the terminal and NOT what is unseen, like escape sequences/control-characters...

Thanks Again,
Matt

---------- Post updated at 06:52 PM ---------- Previous update was at 05:41 PM ----------

To explain a little better of what I'm trying to do see below, *maybe there is a simpler way....

So what the goal is, I'm trying get the output of the AIX command "topas" into a text file so I can grab one specific value... This command is very similar to the top command where it is an interactive command which just continuously updates the terminal window with new values every 2 seconds... Since it does that, that is why the control characters show up in the text file. They use the control characters to place the values correctly on the screen.

If you redirect topas to a text file and kill it right away, and then do a vi / view of the file the values are all over the place. It seems like it shows some of the Value's labels in the correct spot but their actual values could show up 20 lines below where it would be if you just did a 'cat' on the file.

I was praying topas had a command line switch similar to top's "-b" option for batch mode, but it does not...

There is a way to record the topas command's values with the topasrec command, but the output from that is harder to understand then just using topas. And I believe you need to use something like Excel to read that file....

I guess if there isn't another way I can just do what I'm already doing and see if that Label's value shows up on the exact same line everytime... If it does, I can just hard-code it in to capture that specific line and pull out the value... But, I guess we'll see.

Thanks Again,
Matt