This is brilliant, Aleksej! When the new Rolling came out last night I first ran a little test script that installs Abiword ...
tst() {
tazpkg -gi abiword
}
tst $1 2>&1 | tee tst.log
The log file of this looked already much more readable because the vertical columns had been preserved. But there were still escape sequences in it, so I mopped them up with this ...
sed -i 's/'$'\x1b''\[0m//g' tst.log
sed -i 's/'$'\x1b''\[1m//g' tst.log
sed -i 's/'$'\x1b''\[1;32m//g' tst.log
sed -i 's/'$'\x1b''\[0;33m//g' tst.log
sed -i 's/'$'\x1b''\[0;39m//g' tst.log
... which made the log file practically indistinguishable from what I had seen on the screen when Abiword was being installed. Great! But it is not very elegant to 're-format' a text file like this and, more importantly, it only works properly on 80 character terminals and not at the 5.0 console. So, I dumped it all and put your magic one-liner ...
export output=raw
... at the top of the test script, which produced a perfectly formatted log file straight away, without the need to go over it again. Ingenious, Aleksej! Thanks a lot for this.