Which control characters? And you say around file names... did you run "ls" while in your script session? if you generated colorized output, script will reco

Which control characters? And you say around file names... did you run "ls" while in your script session? if you generated colorized output, script will record that. If you don't want colorized output, run "\ls" (bypass any alias you might have for ls, and just run ls directly) or use "ls --color=never". You'll still see ^M at the end of each line. You can run "dos2unix typescript" to strip those out. It's script's job to record your entire session, including any control characters, and it does that.