Bug#672361: bootlogd: escape sequences should be filtered out

[Jesse Smith]

On 8/12/19 4:20 AM, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> On 2019-08-11 17:57:18 -0300, Jesse Smith wrote:
>> For situations like this where you already have a log with escape
>> characters in it, you can fix the output by using the readbootlog
>> program, which is part of the sysvinit suite. It cleans out most of the
>> control characters so the log looks like a normal, plain-text file.
> It does not seem to be in Debian (not installed by default, not found
> by "apt-file search readbootlog").
>
Which version of sysvinit do you have installed? You'd need a version
from around 2.90 or newer.

>> There might be problems with some implementations of these utilities
>> due to binary data, but AFAIK, coreutils implementation is fine with
>> escape sequences.

They are not. As I mentioned above, I tested this.

>> If this is correct with "less", then there should be no issues with a
>> decent implementation of "cat", "head" and "tail".

Sadly, that is not the case.