7.2.3.5 -sanitise-stream: control output sanitisation

In some situations, Plink applies a sanitisation pass to the output received from the server, to strip out control characters such as backspace and the escape character.

The idea of this is to prevent remote processes from sending confusing escape sequences through the standard error channel when Plink is being used as a transport for something like git or CVS. If the server actually wants to send an error message, it will probably be plain text; if the server abuses that channel to try to write over unexpected parts of your terminal display, Plink will try to stop it.

By default, this only happens for output channels which are sent to a Windows console device, or a Unix terminal device. (Any output stream going somewhere else is likely to be needed by an 8-bit protocol and must not be tampered with at all.) It also stops happening if you tell Plink to allocate a remote pseudo-terminal (see section 3.11.3.12 and section 4.24.1), on the basis that in that situation you often want escape sequences from the server to go to your terminal.

But in case Plink guesses wrong about whether you want this sanitisation, you can override it in either direction, using one of these options:

-sanitise-stderr

Sanitise server data written to Plink's standard error channel, regardless of terminals and consoles and remote ptys.

-no-sanitise-stderr

Do not sanitise server data written to Plink's standard error channel.

-sanitise-stdout

Sanitise server data written to Plink's standard output channel.

-no-sanitise-stdout

Do not sanitise server data written to Plink's standard output channel.