I've been in the situation where I ran a script that behaved weirdly and would love to be able to "replay" what I did to figure out what went wrong. A useful command for those cases is script(1).
The script command (introduced in 1979) allows you to record a terminal session to a file. You can later check and reference that file to analyse it as you please. Or maybe record your terminal as a demo.
As with any other Unix command, the power comes from your creativity on how to use it. You can use script to:
- Record a demo.
- Capture output.
- Record session to report a bug.
You can try it just by typing script in your terminal. It opens up a new shell that will be recorded. By default, the session is saved in a file named typescript.
$ script
% ls
% exit
You can then view the capture by using cat(1):
$ cat typescript
If you are interested in more detail, here are my notes on how to use it:
https://rderik.com/notes/using-the-script-command-to-record-a-terminal-session/
Top comments (2)
I really dig script. Ever want to push scriptfiles to github?
That's an interesting use of Gists, thanks for sharing!