Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,
Is there anyway to duplicate output without using tee?

Let me explain the problem.
We are use ssh to login to remote server and save output to a file using tee commands for auditing purposes. When we use vi editor in ssh session, letters get garbled and cant really use vi. Without tee it works fine, but at the same time we need auditing as well.


Your suggestions are appreciated.

Regards

Use the script command.
script audit_save_file

Here "script" will save the session, input and output, to the named file. The script program will run a subshell and you type your commands into the subshell. vi will work, but the saved output will look really screwy.

Thanks for the reply, that really is a very good option. Though I am not able to totally replace tee with script command.

There are hundreds of users login with this method and their sessions get automatically saved with tee command. I coulnt find a way to replace tee with script command. Can you please suggest?

Thanks in advance.

vi ( and curses based programs ) have a finite list
of "garbage" characters that they print. It shouldn't be
too hard to catalog these and use a sed script to translate
all of those strings to new-lines, or spaces.

For example:

cat audit_file |
sed -e 's/^[[[0-9](;//g' \
-e 's/^[[./s/ /g' \
-e 's/^H//g' \
...

etc...

Where the ESC keys and backspaces are entered into the script
using CONTROL-V.

Thanks for the reply.

Problem is not with the audit_file, its with the session itself, while in session, we cant use vi if we use tee command to save output to audit_file, without tee it works just fine, but if we dont use tee, we wont have audit_file. Thats why i want a good alternate to tee, like script command, but i am not able to get both things work, which is redirect output to audit_file+terminal session.

Hope this clarifies a bit.

Thanks

I just tried it using typescript and it saved everything just fine . . .
using rlogin though.... not ssh.

vi put the weird characters in the typescript file, but those
are easily removed using the sed solution earlier posted.

I don't think you can get around having to edit out the weird
vi characters.

Another alternative would be to start up typescript within the
users' .profile or .login files once they login.

Thanks for the reply.

I am not worried about the audite_file at all. The problem is with the actual sessions, when user login using this method to a remote server, thats where the problem is, they cant use vi due to the garbled letters.