Most of us have wanted, at some time or another, to share an entire “session” on the terminal. I mean showing a log of the commands we typed, their output, and so on, to illustrate a procedure or clarify a concept.

The “script” command has long been a tool of choice for this. To use it, just type:

script

this will seem to start a new shell process and start recording everything you type and everything that other commands output in response. To stop recording, just type “exit”. A file called typescript will be created with your session. If you want, you can call script with a parameter (script your-file.log) to log to that file instead.

A newer implementation of the concept is ttyrec. It behaves mostly the same as script, but instead of producing openable text files, it logs keystrokes and timing information. You need to play these back using ttyplay, but the result is pretty amazing because you can see the keystrokes being played back as they were typed. You can also instruct ttyplay to just dump the session to a plain text file, which mimics script’s behavior.

Finally, to take this concept one step further, have a look at showterm, which does essentially the same as ttyrec but automatically saves and uploads the session to a website for you to share with people. Think of it as an interactive pastebin.