shell-command-logger 0.2.0

Logs the output of commands, so that it can be replayed later

Shell command logger (scl)

This program uses the linux script and scriptreplay commands to record and replay the output of any desired commands.

Installation

Install via pip:

pip install shell-command-loggger

Or install the bleeding edge version from this repository:

pip install git+https://github.com/six-two/shell-command-logger

Usage

Record

To record a command, you just prefix it with scl:

scl ls -1 /

You can also create a symlink to log all invocations of a programm automatically:

1. Find/add a writeable directory to the beginning of your $PATH. For example:

   mkdir ~/.bin
   echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
   

2. Find out, where the scl binary is installed:

   $ which scl
   /home/<user>/.local/bin/scl
   

3. Create a symlink named the same as your favourite command. The symlink should be in the folder from step 1 and point to the scl binary (path from step 2). For example:

   ln -s /home/<user>/.local/bin/scl ~/.bin/nmap
   

4. Logout and log back in and check if the $PATH is set correctly:

   $ echo $PATH
   /home/<user>/.bin:/usr/local/sbin:...
   

5. Try to execute your command. You should now see the "Shell Command Logger" outputs:

   $ nmap localhost
   ############################# Shell Command Logger #############################
   # Timestamp : 2022-03-20 13:30:53 GMT
   # User      : <user>@<hostname>
   # Command   : /usr/bin/nmap localhost
   ################################ Process Output ################################
   ...
   

Replay

If you only want to see the final output, just cat the .log file:

cat ~/.shell-command-logs/<command>/<timestamp>.log

Replay a command (watch output in realtime):

scl-replay ~/.shell-command-logs/<command>/<timestamp>.log

If you want to replay the command on a different system, that does not have scl-replay installed, you can also invoke scriptreplay directly:

scriptreplay --log-out ~/.shell-command-logs/<command>/<timestamp>.log --log-timing ~/.shell-command-logs/<command>/<timestamp>.time

TODOs

• Load settings from a config file
• Different replay speeds
• Create a README in the output location, that xeplains how to understand the logs

Date format

The normal (Gregorian) caledar is not very intuitive. Thus I have decided to use an alternative date format, that uses the week number and the type of day. The format is <YYYY>w<WW><D> where

• <YYYY> is the current year (like 2022)
• w is an indicator, that teh follwoing is a week and not a month
• <WW> is the number of the current week.
• <D> is the day type expressed as a letter (a -> Monday, b -> Tueday, ..., g -> Sunday)

For example the Tuesday of the 9th week in 2022 would be written as 2022w09b.

This format is similar to ISO 8601 week dates (which formats dates like 2022-W092), but with the following differences:

• The separator between the year and month is w instead of -W to make the dates shorter (and easier to type)
• Instead of using a number for the day of the week a letter is used. This should be less confusing and still makes dates sortable by lexicographical order

You can obtain today's date in this format with the following bash command:

echo $(date +%Gw%V)$(date +%u | tr '[1-7]' '[a-g]')