Home / server / Questions / 154168
In Process
jes5199
Asked: 2010-06-24 11:03:21 +0800 CST

strip out VT100 control characters from a log file

  • 772

I've got a file that's full of VT100 color codes, which is making it hard to search. Is there a unix utility that can strip those out so I'm left with plain text?

log-files color

4 Answers

  1. Try catting it through col -b

    cat file | col -b

    This works for stripping the troff/nroff formatting for man pages. Worth a try.

    If that doesn't work, there's quite a good thread on perlmonks:

    http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=132997

    • 1

  2. This might help:

    esc=$'\033'
sed "s/${esc}[^m]*m//g" inputfile
    • 1

  3. the strings command possibly!

    • 0

  4. Trying to cleanup the output of a script run?

    I remember there was a script that did exactly this on some system I used to have access to... I think it was the University of Waterloo Math Department's Unix machines.

    But I think some clever bastard there wrote it a while ago. Find a friend still at UW :)

    • 0