Is it possible to log what happens in the CPAN shell? Sometimes, when installing a bundle and something bad happens, I can not scroll back far enough. Therefore I can not go back to the first point where problems occurred. I tried cpan | tee -a mylog.txt, but the shell does not behave nicely with tee: the prompt does not appear after a command and the cursor ends up in peculiar places.

Update: Thank you all for pointing me to script. I realise I want logging often when learning new things (in this case the CPAN shell). In my search I also discovered two other possibilities, although script remains the best and simplest:

  1. CPANPLUS has a write_install_log configuration parameter.
  2. File::Tee can do it if one doesn't mind missing STDIN in the log. Edit (a copy of) the cpan script and put the following somewhere at the top: 
    use File::Tee;
tee STDOUT, { prefix => 'OUT: ', 
              lock => 1, 
              mode => '>>', 
              open => '/tmp/log.txt' };
tee STDERR, { prefix => 'ERR: ', 
              lock => 1, 
              mode => '>>', 
              open => '/tmp/log.txt' };

    [download]

In reply to Logging the CPAN Shell by carol

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.