Bash – Start all terminal sessions within /usr/bin/script

bashbashrclogs

I would like to expend some disk space recording all input and output to my terminal sessions; /usr/bin/script appears to be fairly good at that. I would like to make it so all new shell sessions (Currently I use/bin/bash) could start inside a script session that logged to a file by the name of say ~/.log/$(date --iso-8601=second).log

I've tried calling script at the end of my .bashrc file but recall it basically crashing and making opening a new shell impossible.

Any ideas on a possible way to keep this kind of record? I already have an "Eternal bash history" but just knowing the inputs is not always enough for me.

Best Answer

I don't think putting it at the bottom of your rcfile would do much good - all of the state you declared beforehand would get wiped out when script loaded a new shell until it tried to load the rcfile and etc and etc forever. I just made it work on my terminal like:

$ x=;bash --rcfile /dev/fd/3 3<<\$x
    export S_LOG=~/".log/$(date --iso-8601=second).log"
    exec   script -aeqfc "bash   --rcfile /dev/fd/3 -i" "$S_LOG" \
3<<""
    alias success='echo it worked'
    PS1='script $ '
    exec 3<&-

$x
script $ success
it worked
script $ cat "$S_LOG"
Script started on Mon Dec 14 15:43:28 2015
script $ success
it worked
script $ cat "$S_LOG"
script $

And so I think you'd do better to locate it at the head of your rc-file, and then exec a new shell to read the rest of it after the point you call the new shell.

Related Solutions

Bash – How to automatically record all your terminal sessions with script utility

If someone wants to record their terminal sessions automatically--including SSH sessions(!)--using the script utility, here is how.

Add the following line at the end of .bashrc in your home directory, or otherwise /etc/bash.bashrc if you only want to record all users' sessions. We test for shell's parent process not being script and then run script.

For Linux:

test "$(ps -ocommand= -p $PPID | awk '{print $1}')" == 'script' || (script -f $HOME/$(date +"%d-%b-%y_%H-%M-%S")_shell.log)

For BSD and macOS, change script -f to script -F:

test "$(ps -ocommand= -p $PPID | awk '{print $1}')" == 'script' || (script -F $HOME/$(date +"%d-%b-%y_%H-%M-%S")_shell.log)

That's all!

Now when you open a new terminal you'll see:

Script started, file is /home/username/file_name.log

script will write your sessions to a file in your home directory naming them something like 30-Nov-11_00-11-12_shell.log as a result.

More customization:

You can append your sessions to one large file rather than creating a new one for every session with script -a /path/to/single_log_file
You can adjust where the files are written to by changing the path after script -f (Linux) or script -F (BSD and macOS)

This answer assumes that you have script installed, of course. On Debian-based distributions, script is part of the bsdutils package.

Bash and Cron – Why Cron Ignores Variables Defined in .bashrc and .bash_profile

You can source the file you want at the top of the script or beginning of the job for the user that is executing the job. The "source" command is a built-in. You'd do the same thing if you made edits to those files to load the changes.

* * * * * source /home/user/.bash_profile; <command>

#!/bin/bash
source /home/user/.bash_profile

<commands>

Best Answer

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Bash – How to automatically record all your terminal sessions with script utility

Bash and Cron – Why Cron Ignores Variables Defined in .bashrc and .bash_profile

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