record the terminal session and replay later

May 11th, 2007 mysurface Posted in Misc, script, scriptreplay | Hits: 63461 | 14 Comments »

I have read this at linuxinsight, which is amazing. You can actually record down your typing, screen output even you are running ncurses cli, all the data will store into a file and the timing will be into another file. With this two files, you can have scriptreplay to replay it all with the correct timing.

Recording goes like this

script -t 2> tutorial.timing -a tutorial.session

type ‘exit’ to end the recording.

Replay goes like this

scriptreplay tutorial.timing tutorial.session

Both session and timing file is readable, if you do not need to be replay, just do

script -a tutorial.txt

You might be asking what have script did? logged your input as well as screen output? That means the password will be recorded as well when you do sudo? The answer is NO, script save only the things that is visible to you, not your keyboard hit. Same things goes to scriptreplay, it just play what ever is recorded, no real command executing during replay.

I found that generating and replay with two files (session and timing files) is a bit messy. Therefore I created a bash script to cater that, I name it as script.sh. it will be creating only one file (it is just a dirty trick, read the bash script you will understand), replay and record uses script.sh is convenience.

To record,