How to remove control characters from the output of top

[JLiYim]

Hi,

I need to find a way to get the output for top into a plain text file which can be sent by email or posted on a web site. I have tried setting the terminal to dumb but top complain about not knowing how to deal with a dumb terminal.

Regards,
John Li Yim

[Rajeev Shukla]

Did you go through the man pages of top probably there is a way to put the output into a file using -f option.

Rajeev

[JLiYim]

I have tried top -f but the output still contain control characters. I read that the top utility from http://www.groupsys.com/top/index.html have the -b option to output only text but this utility cannot be compiled on HPUX 11.00.

John

[Jose Mosquera]

Are sending your output file via ftp? pls remember character conversion via ftp, if you need avoid that characters controls keep, use option ASCII intead BINARY. Another way is use ftp in ascii mode like a *filter* to avoid standar characters controls.

Another way is ussing tr command (translate caracters) to clear not wanted chars, pls see man, is too easy.

sed command may be is usefull to you, i.e:
cat file_in | sed 's/^M//' > file_out
In this case ^M will be replaced by null, in others words, deleted.


Rgds.

[U.SivaKumar_2]

Hi,

From a windows 98 PC i will telnet and login to unix server and run
#top

Then In the windows telnet window select Edit -> Select all
then Edit -> copy all

I will then paste it to a word file which you can mail. It works without problem.

regards,
U.SivaKumar

[john korterman]

Hi John,
I once tried to make a crontab script execute a top command and afterwards mail the result; tricky because of the many control chars produced by top. The attached script shows my last attempt - which looks unfinished (which it is) but I have just checked that it actually worked on a 11.0 machine where it mailed a nice output to me.
The idea of the script is first to redirect std. error from top to /dev/null, as many of the noisy chars are written to that. Afterwards the control char sequences are replaced by spaces, one by one. Not at very elegant solution, but that might be the way to go.

regards,
John K.

[Systeemingenieurs Infoc]

before you ftp files to an nt or pc, you should try this :
top -s1 -d1 -f fname.top
iconv -f roma8 -t iso81 fname.top >top.txt

or you could user the command ux2dos.

hope this helps.

[Phillip Renner]

HI all,

top -d1 -f works form me and I just redirtect it into a file.

[Phillip Renner]

HI all,

top -d1 -f works for me and I just redirect it into a file.

[Kim Kendall]

Phillip,
Yes you can get it into a file, and even cat the file and it looks okay. But try to do a more on it, or better yet, try to vi it. You'll see that the formatting is all hosed up.

[Frank Slootweg]

Adding something like "-n 1000" (show 1000 processes) lets you see all/most processes instead just one 'screen'.

[Frank Slootweg]

Kim,

On my systems, both 10.20 and 11.0, the "top -d 1 -n 1000 -f filename" output looks fine, both with vi(1) and more(1). Doing a vis(1) on the output file gives an indentical output, i.e. there are no control characters (other than the normal end-of-line linefeed) in the output file.

[JLiYim]

"top -d1 -f " works now. I believe that previously the control characters were still appearing in the output file because my terminal setting was not "right".

I have tried it for the past few days and the output is fine now.

Regards,
John Li Yim