[SOLVED] How to record a command line session to a file?

Telengard · 05-19-2011, 02:03 PM

I recently borked my video driver with a series of upgrades and found my system booting to the TTY with no access to the desktop, graphical login, or even X. I spent some days troubleshooting the problem and experimenting with possible fixes. I found myself wishing for some way to copy and paste from the TTY, or at least log all input and output to a file.

I have considered that something like this might lead to a solution:

Code:

# bash 2>&1 | tee /tty-session.log

I'm not sure it would work as expected, and it doesn't seem very graceful.

Does anyone have nice solution?

T3RM1NVT0R · 05-19-2011, 02:07 PM

Hi there,

Check out the following links:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/list-co...n-linuxserver/

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/howto-...ccounting.html

Telengard · 05-19-2011, 04:45 PM

psacct seems a little heavy. I'm not after forensic analysis and accounting.

Suppose in a command line only session (no desktop, no X, just me and TTY1 and bash) I did something like this:

Code:

grep -i 'nouveau' /var/log/Xorg.0.log

The command produced a few interesting lines of output, but then I made some configuration changes and rebooted to try something else. Afterward I realize that it would have been nice to refer back to some of those lines as they were before the configuration changes.

Code:

sudo find / -name 'nvidia*' -print -delete

The name of each file is printed, and then it is deleted without prompting. After the process completes I realize that 50 or more filenames scrolled off screen and I can't scroll back to read the names of them all.

In Konsole I have tons of scrollback and I can easily copy and paste with my mouse. Not so with the TTY without X.

T3RM1NVT0R · 05-19-2011, 05:24 PM

Then you can use script command to capture the activities going on, on your terminal. For more info check out this link: https://knowledgecenter.citrix.com/article/CTX116378

Telengard · 05-19-2011, 06:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by T3RM1NVT0R

Then you can use script command to capture the activities going on

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/.../script.1.html
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/...treplay.1.html

Hmm ... this is actually quite nice

Code:

foo$ ls
input-file.txt  timingfile  typescript
foo$ script -t 2> timingfile
Script started, file is typescript
foo$ rm input-file.txt
foo$ exit
Script done, file is typescript
foo$ ls
timingfile  typescript
foo$ scriptreplay timingfile
foo$ rm input-file.txt
foo$ exit
foo$

What about copy and paste without X? Does such a thing exist?

T3RM1NVT0R · 05-19-2011, 06:18 PM

When you say copy and paste I am assuming that you want to copy a particular file or directory or directory with subdirectory to a particular location. If that is the case then you can go with the following commands:

cp -arvp /root/test /tmp

The above command will work on both when test is a file or when test is a directory, this will copy over test file or directory from /root to /tmp. Good thing about using all these switches (-arvp) is that it will copy over hidden files as well.

Where,

a=all (including hidden)
r=recursive
v=verbose
p=preserve permissions

Edit: I just realized that you might be pointing to copying and pasting commands as we can do in X console. Well that will not be possible when you are working on CLI without X.