Question about piping yum to tee

[AlFrugal]

I run FC5 and am a *novice* Linux user. When running yum, I like to keep a record of what happened as well as watch the progress on the screen, so I pipe yum to tee. For example: "yum groupinstall xxx | tee xxxinstall"

This works as I expected except for one thing.

At the tail end of the yum processing, something like the following should be displayed:

Transaction Summary
================================================== ===========================
Install 18 Package(s)
Update 1 Package(s)
Remove 0 Package(s)
Total download size: 125 M
Is this ok [y/N]:


This indeed gets written to the file (e.g. xxxinstall). But the line "Is this ok [y/N]:" does not get displayed on the screen. However, if I enter "y" or "N" on the keyboard anyway, yum proceeds to completion.

Why isn't the line "Is this ok [y/N]:" being displayed?

[dishawjp]

I can't answer your question, however I can make a suggestion, use the "script" command instead. It should record all inputs and outputs...everything you see on your screen.

Begin by giving the command :

script nnn

Then just run yum or whatever. When you want to stop recording, type <ctrl>D and everything should be recorded in the file "nnn." Obviously you can change the filename to be whatever you choose.

HTH,

Jim

[AlFrugal]

Thanks dishawjp for the alternate approach.

[AlFrugal]

I received an automatic email from Fedoraforum that user "brunson" has replied to this thread. The email listed the reply. But I don't see the reply on the thread.....

Anyway, brunson's suggestion was:

***************
It's probably writing it to stderr rather than stdout.

yum groupinstall xxx 2>&1 | tee xxxinstall
***************

So I tried that today with two different yum updates. (I didn't have anything to install today). In both cases, the screen froze partway through yum's listing of "Dependencies Resolved". This is the step just before the transaction summary. In both cases, if I entered "N", then the listing of resolved dependencies on the screen resumed, and yum exited. So it appears that writing to stderr is not the problem I'm having.

I expect with the release of F7 scheduled for tomorrow, the FC5 mirrors will be locked, so I won't be able to do more experiments for 7-10 days.

[Dies]

He probably double checked and deleted his reply when he realized that wasn't the case.

Now I'm wondering, if you are just updating or installing something, wouldn't this work just as well, sorry I toasted my FC install and since F7 is almost out I can't really try it.

yum -y install xxx > yum-053007.txt

BTW - a record is already kept in /var/log/

[sideways]

dishawjp's solution is great, just that you may need to remove escape sequences and control characters from the resulting log

cat xxxinstall | col -b > tidy_xxxinstall

This is assuming you did the following

script xxxinstall
yum groupinstall xxx
(answer y to the question)
(press CTRL-D on completion)