Tee alternative (user input missed)

Question

we are using some 3rd party interactive command line tool, and we use tee for logging what a user did - to check later if needed...

The tool works the way it ask which action user want to perform and user selects something and continue with submenu or the action is executed.

Recently (when we needed to check such log) we realized, the user inputs are not there. Is there some alternative - how to achieve that?

When I tried to simulate the tool with:

$ cat r.sh
read -p "Enter some text: " text
echo $text

echo -n "Enter another text: "
read text2
echo $text2

I tested and this is the output

$ ./r.sh | tee run.log
Enter some text: abc
abc
Enter another text: def
def

$ cat run.log
abc
Enter another text: def

Ideally I'd like to have the same what user saw, which is not the same as you can see.

Solution:

If someone needs it I tested with

script -c ./r.sh script.log

and it worked as expected + I tested with this 3rd party tool.

Answer 1

You could use script for this; it creates a nested tty and records everything that happens in it.

If you also specify --timing=… it can even produce replayable "videos" of full-screen interactive programs (like text editors and such).

---

(For completeness – There is another similar tool asciinema, which is a hosted service which automatically publishes records at https://asciinema.org/. Useful for making demos and tutorials.)