4.2 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:
- ‘None’. This is the default option; in this mode PuTTY will not create a log file at all.
- ‘Printable output’. 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.
- ‘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.
- ‘SSH packets’. In this mode (which is only used by SSH connections), the SSH message packets sent over the encrypted connection are written to the log file (as well as Event Log entries). You might need this to debug a network-level problem, or more likely to send to the PuTTY authors as part of a bug report. BE WARNED that if you log in using a password, the password can appear in the log file; see section 4.2.4 for options that may help to remove sensitive material from the log file before you send it to anyone else.
- ‘SSH packets and raw data’. In this mode, as well as the decrypted packets (as in the previous mode), the raw (encrypted, compressed, etc) packets are also logged. This could be useful to diagnose corruption in transit. (The same caveats as the previous mode apply, of course.)
Note that the non-SSH logging options (‘Printable output’ and ‘All session output’) only work with PuTTY proper; in programs without terminal emulation (such as Plink), they will have no effect, even if enabled via saved settings.