If you are trying to help someone remotely with a Unix problem and like to see what that person is actually typing instead of having conversation like the following: "Enter ls at the prompt and hit enter" "Now how does your screen look like?" "Do you see a the 'x' file in that listing" ... Try this - have the person on the other end do telnet localhost | tee -a /tmp/ - now telnet to the machine yourself and do a tail -f Now you can see all the screen dumps including the keystrokes. Off course this won't work if you can't log on to that machine. But, it still could be handy.