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[H.G.Muller]

Could you elaborate on what exactly it is that Arena does? Is it that you can see the engine-GUI traffic real time? Wit XBoard you can do that, by setting the debug file to stderr. Then all debug output, which includes all time-stamped engine traffic, appears in the xterm from which you started it.

Of course you could pipe stderr to some filter, to pass only lines that contain 'first' or 'second', to be somewhat more selective.

If you want to see what the UCI traffic, you could can use UCIWB as adapter in stead of Polyglot, as it relays all the raw engine input to the GUI as debug statements, so they appear in the XBoard debug file.