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• The Logging panel
• "Log file name"
• "What to do if the log file already exists"

Section 3.2: The Logging panel

The Logging configuration panel allows you to save log files of your PuTTY sessions, for debugging, analysis or future reference.

The main option is a radio-button set that specifies whether PuTTY will log anything at all. The options are

• "Logging turned off completely". This is the default option; in this mode PuTTY will not create a log file at all.
• "Log printable output only". In this mode, a log file will be created and written to, but only printable text will be saved into it. The various terminal control codes that are typically sent down an interactive session alongside the printable text will be omitted. This might be a useful mode if you want to read a log file in a text editor and hope to be able to make sense of it.
• "Log all session output". In this mode, everything sent by the server into your terminal session is logged. If you view the log file in a text editor, therefore, you may well find it full of strange control characters. This is a particularly useful mode if you are experiencing problems with PuTTY's terminal handling: you can record everything that went to the terminal, so that someone else can replay the session later in slow motion and watch to see what went wrong.

3.2.1 "Log file name"

In this edit box you enter the name of the file you want to log the session to. The "Browse" button will let you look around your file system to find the right place to put the file; or if you already know exactly where you want it to go, you can just type a pathname into the edit box.

There are a few special features in this box. If you use the & character in the file name box, PuTTY will insert details of the current session in the name of the file it actually opens. The precise replacements it will do are:

• &Y will be replaced by the current year, as four digits.
• &M will be replaced by the current month, as two digits.
• &D will be replaced by the current day of the month, as two digits.
• &T will be replaced by the current time, as six digits (HHMMSS) with no punctuation.
• &H will be replaced by the host name you are connecting to.

For example, if you enter the host name c:\puttylogs\log-&h-&y&m&d-&t.dat, you will end up with files looking like

log-server1.example.com-20010528-110859.dat
log-unixbox.somewhere.org-20010611-221001.dat

3.2.2 "What to do if the log file already exists"

This control allows you to specify what PuTTY should do if it tries to start writing to a log file and it finds the file already exists. You might want to automatically destroy the existing log file and start a new one with the same name. Alternatively, you might want to open the existing log file and add data to the end of it. Finally (the default option), you might not want to have any automatic behaviour, but to ask the user every time the problem comes up.

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