Generally, all Linux administrators use history command to track which commands were executed in previous sessions, but there is one limitation of history command is that it doesn’t store the command’s output. There can be some scenarios where we want to check commands output of previous session and want to compare it with current session. Apart from this, there are some situations where we are troubleshooting the issues on Linux production boxes and want to save all terminal session activities for future reference, so in such cases script command become handy.
Script is a command line tool which is used to capture or record your Linux server terminal sessions activity and later the recorded session can be replay using scriptreplay command. In this article we will demonstrate how to install script command line tool and how to use script tool to record Linux server terminal session activity and then later we will see how the recorded session can be replayed using scriptreplay command.
Installation of Script tool on RHEL 7/ CentOS 7
Script command is provided by the rpm package “util-linux”, so install it on your CentOS 7 / RHEL 7 system in case it is not installed, run the following yum command,
[[email protected] ~]# yum install util-linux -y
On RHEL 8 / CentOS 8
Run the following dnf command to install script utility on RHEL 8 and CentOS 8 system,
[[email protected] ~]# dnf install util-linux -y
Installation of Script tool on Debian based systems (Ubuntu / Linux Mint)
Execute the beneath apt-get command to install script utility
[email protected] ~]# apt-get install util-linux -y
How to Use script utility
Use of script command is straight forward, type script command on terminal then hit enter, it will start capturing your current terminal session activity inside a file called “typescript”
[[email protected] ~]# script
Script started, file is typescript
[[email protected] ~]#
To stop recording the session activities, type exit command and hit enter.
[[email protected] ~]# exit
exit
Script done, file is typescript
[[email protected] ~]#
Syntax of Script command:
~ ] # script {options} {file_name}
Different options used in script command,
Let’s start recording of your Linux terminal session by executing script command and then execute couple of command like ‘w’, ‘route -n’ , ‘df -h’ and ‘free-h’, example is shown below
As we can see above, terminal session logs are saved in the file “typescript”
Now view the contents of typescript file using cat / vi,
[[email protected] ~]# ls -l typescript
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 1861 Jun 21 00:50 typescript
[[email protected] ~]#
Above confirms that whatever commands we execute on terminal that have been saved inside the file “typescript”
Use Custom File name in script command
Let’s assume we want to use our customize file name to script command, so specify the file name after script command, in the below example we are using a file name “session-log-(current-date-time).txt
[[email protected] ~]# script sessions-log-$(date +%d-%m-%Y-%T).txt
Script started, file is sessions-log-21-06-2019-01:37:39.txt
[[email protected] ~]#
Now run the commands and then type exit,
[[email protected] ~]# exit
exit
Script done, file is sessions-log-21-06-2019-01:37:39.txt
[[email protected] ~]#
Append the commands output to script file
Let assume script command had recorded the commands output to a file called session-log.txt file and now we want to append output of new sessions commands output …
