ascii capture from ttys0 to archive, any ideas?

From: Douglas Cole (n7bfs_at_qwest.net)
Date: 09/25/03 

Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2003 08:36:16 -0700

First thing to say, I am not a programmer, but want to learn some basic
scripting skills and I was hoping the above task would be a good place to
start.

To expand upon what I desire to do, I have a device that continuously
streams out of its (serial) printer port alarm/activity info that I would
like to capture and save to a file on a pc, that I can then later search through
if needed and copy text from, also the file should have a size limit so
that once it reaches that size the 'app will give that file a name
(date/time etc...) and then start a new file and keep capturing incoming
text. If possible, having a browser interface for searching the file would
be cool.

Could someone give me some rough pointers on what type of language/'s would
work best for this task, how I would go about structuring the
program/script and where I might find more info that could help me learn how
to do this ?

Now, I don't expect someone to basically write me the proggie, but as I
really don't have a programming background and have only recently been
modifying bash scripts to see what happens, I am rather a newbie and so
may be trying to do something beyond my abilities, so please be patient
with my ignorance...

tia for any possible help .

Douglas Cole