Mail Archives: cygwin/2008/03/24/15:53:18
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
>
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