Pause pkg install messages

[Guido Falsi]

On 05/24/18 10:08, Johannes Lundberg wrote:
> Hi
> 
> The first thing me and probably many other do after install is
> pkg install xxx yyy zzz
> from console (meaning no scrollback buffer).

FreeBSD console does have a scrollback buffer. just press scroll-lock
and use the page up/page down buttons to move around the buffer.


By default the buffer isn't very big so it could not suffice if the
output is actually very very long. it can be configured using vidcontrol(1).

> 
> With xorg and friends this means hundreds of packets. After install all the
> pkg messages are display and most of sometimes very valuable information is
> just scrolled away.
> 
> Is there an easy way to fix* this by piping the output through less or
> something to pause for each screen so that the messages just aren't
> scrolled away?

script(1) could save it to a file in realtime and you can read it from
another terminal, and leave you a file with all the output.

> 
> In addition to that it would be nice (if it's not already done) to store
> this information in a log file somewhere so that one can revisit and see
> what needs to be manually configured for each installed package.

pkg generates log lines about what it installs updates, which can be
found in /var/log/messages with default syslogd configuration, for example:

May 24 08:37:55 *** pkg[6058]: thunderbird upgraded: 52.8.0 -> 52.8.0_5
May 24 08:37:55 *** pkg[6058]: p5-DateTime upgraded: 1.48 -> 1.49
May 24 08:37:56 *** pkg[6058]: java-zoneinfo upgraded: 2018.d -> 2018.e
May 24 08:38:02 *** pkg[6058]: firefox upgraded: 60.0.1,1 -> 60.0.1_3,1
May 24 08:38:02 *** pkg[6058]: devcpu-data upgraded: 1.16_1 -> 1.16_2

-- 
Guido Falsi <mad at madpilot.net>