Shell – how can i automatically record every terminal session

historylogsshelltypescript

I like to use tools like history, script, and asciinema to record and review xterm (i.e. bash/sh) sessions for typical, general administration reasons, and also, sometimes for comprehensive study/revision; as a learning tool.

I thought of setting the default $SHELL as a direct path to said tools and/or commands, like:
- /bin/script transcript.log;
- /bin/asciinema rec -w0.5 term_log.json;
But these tools typically rely on having a default $SHELL set (i.e. /bin/bash, /bin/sh, /bin/zsh, etc.).
Also, I feel like re-defining system variables (i.e. $SHELL, $TERM, etc.) or trying to get it working with config (*.conf) and dot (~/.bashrc / ~/.bash_profile) files is gona be riddled with all kinds of holes and potential problems.
However, every time I decide or realize that I want a transcript of a session, it's after the fact, or I'll be halfway through the interesting part already, or some such scenario.

What's the correct, or best practice to set something like this up to simply log everything (preferably stdin, stdout (and stderr when applicable), etc.) automatically?

Best Answer

Something like this in your .bash_profile or .bashrc might work for you:

if test -t 0 -a -t 1 -a -z "$SCRIPTING"
then
    export SCRIPTING="$HOME/.script.$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S).$$)"
    exec script "$SCRIPTING"
fi

Related Solutions

shell – How to Use `which` on an Aliased Command

which is actually a bad way to do things like this, as it makes guesses about your environment based on $SHELL and the startup files (it thinks) that shell uses; not only does it sometimes guess wrong, but you can't generally tell it to behave differently. (which on my Ubuntu 10.10 doesn't understand --skip-alias as mentioned by @SiegeX, for example.) type uses the current shell environment instead of poking at your config files, and can be told to ignore parts of that environment, so it shows you what will actually happen instead of what would happen in a reconstruction of your default shell.

In this case, type -P will bypass any aliases or functions:

$ type -P vim
/usr/bin/vim

You can also ask it to peel off all the layers, one at a time, and show you what it would find:

$ type -a vim
vim is aliased to `vim -X'
vim is /usr/bin/vim

(Expanding on this from the comments:)

The problem with which is that it's usually an external program instead of a shell built-in, which means it can't see your aliases or functions and has to try to reconstruct them from the shell's startup/config files. (If it's a shell built-in, as it is in zsh but apparently not bash, it is more likely to use the shell's environment and do the right thing.)

type is a POSIX-compliant command which is required to behave as if it were a built-in (that is, it must use the environment of the shell it's invoked from including local aliases and functions), so it usually is a built-in.

It isn't generally found in csh/tcsh, although in most modern versions of those which is a shell builtin and does the right thing; sometimes the built-in is what instead, and sometimes there's no good way to see the current shell's environment from csh/tcsh at all.

Log Every Command Typed in Shell – How to Track Command History

Check out auditd. If you add

-a exit,always -F arch=b64 -S execve
-a exit,always -F arch=b32 -S execve

to /etc/audit/audit.rules every executed commands will be logged. See: http://whmcr.com/2011/10/14/auditd-logging-all-commands/

Then send it to a syslog server.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

shell – How to Use `which` on an Aliased Command

Log Every Command Typed in Shell – How to Track Command History

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