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Andy
Asked: 2009-06-15 14:02:01 +0800 CST

BASH shell session logging on remote host

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What's the best method of logging a BASH shell session to a file on the host machine?

The preferred output format would be equivalent to PuTTY's "printable output" log setting, as viewed by the user inclusive of input and exlusive of ncurses control character data.

logging ssh shell remote

7 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    It might be worth looking at shell or system auditing programs like rootsh or sudosh.

    • 4

  2. You could start gnu screen and use the log feature. I don't know of anything that is going to give you a really good log for ncurses applications like top.

    man screen

    log [on|off]

Start/stop writing output of the current window to a file "screenlog.n"
in the window's default directory, where n is the number of the current
window. This filename can be changed with the `logfile' command. ...

logfile filename
logfile flush secs

Defines the name the log files will get. The default is "screenlog.%n".
The  second  form changes the number of seconds screen will wait before
flushing the logfile buffer to the file-system. The default value is 10
seconds.
    • 2

  3. TTYrec is probably the easiest solution. You can use the original:

    http://0xcc.net/ttyrec/index.html.en

    Or roll your own:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ttyrec

    Or, you could get all old school and | all your commands to tee command.timestamp.tee

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  4. The script program will take a complete log of your shell session. Dunno if it's equivalent to any PuTTY thing.

    • 1

  5. You can try to use http://xgu.ru/wiki/LiLaLo It is made in Russia, so documentation is also in Russian, but Google Translate will help you. Here is an example of the output:alt text
    (source: xgu.ru)

    • 0

  6. I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to achieve here. Is this for training or forensics? If you want something that produces nice readable log files you're probably out of luck. If you're looking at being able to playback sessions, ttyrec is what you're after. You can run it as part of a login script to capture a user's session, but make sure you use 'trap' to stop a user from exiting ttyrec and getting back to a shell.

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  7. All entered commands are written into .bash_history file, normally in your home. You can set count of lines that are stored via HISTFILESIZE setting.

    There are no timestamps and output, however.

    If this is really needed, I'd make a wrapper around bash, copying stdin and stdout to a file and work through that.

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