Logging interactive input and output without capturing all typed input and control characters

I am trying to log output from an interactive command-line program; [units](https://www.gnu.org/software/units/) , specifically. I have tried using tee like this: units | tee units.log or script like this: script -c units units.log but they both log all the backspaces and tab completions as special characters like this: You have: 55 horsepower ^G/^H^[[K^M You want: wat^Gt ^M * 41013.493^M / 2.438222e-05^M The manpage for script mentions this issue. > **BUGS** > > Script places everything in the log file, including linefeeds and backspaces. > This is not what the naive user expects. I am aware of the work-around with viewing the file using cat and more or stripping the escape characters with col as mentioned here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7152339/format-output-from-unix-script-command-remove-backspaces-linefeeds-and-delet As well as the perl script here: http://log.guidoderosa.net/2009/05/another-old-post-which-may-be-useful.html But I don't especially want to fix an existing log file: I want to avoid creating new log files garbled with deleted input and control characters. I thought I had fixed the problem using rlwrap, but it conflicts with the units readline functionality, so that it either fails to capture the output, or with rlwrap -a it captures the output but negates the ability of units to use tab-completion. rlwrap -a -N does not help. This is well-documented in the man page: > **BUGS and LIMITATIONS** > > Though it is flexible, delivers the goods (readline functionality), and > adheres to the Unix "many small tools" paradigm, rlwrap is a kludge. It > cannot know anything about command's internal state, which makes > context-sensitive completion impossible. Using the readline library from > within command is still the best option. Is there any way to cleanly log interactive input and output that doesn't mess with the existing readline functionality? Update: I would be happy with something like units | col -b | tee units.log but that hangs while waiting for interactive input. Can this be fixed?