Record & replay Linux terminal sessions using script/scriptreplay & convert them to GIFs using congif.

The script command is available by default on most *nix distributions & is a neat tool for capturing the output of our terminal session to a file. To run the script command type

#script <file name>

If no file name is specified then the output is saved to a file called typescript in the directory from where script command was run.

We can also append session output to the script command by typing

#script -a <file name>

Script combined with scriptreplay command provides an easy to use yet powerful functionality to replay a terminal session recorded with script command.

The catch is that we need to capture the timing information in a time file. The time file contains two pieces of information. The time elapsed since characters were last displayed on the screen & the number of characters typed on the display now.

The timing information is redirected to standard error. So to start the script session while capturing timing information type:

script -t 2> time.txt cmd.txt

To use scriptreplay to replay the session type:

scriptreplay time.txt cmd.txt

Here's a live demo:

Using congif to convert a script session recording into a GIF.

Congif is a tool tool to convert script session recordings to GIF files. You can download congif from github. Once downloaded extract the source code & run make to install the congif binary. 

To create a GIF using congif type:

./congif -l 0 /root/time.txt /root/cmd.txt

• -l 0 means to replay the GIF in an infinite loop.
• time.txt is the timing information file
• cmd.txt is the script command output file.

The output of this command will be a GIF file called con.gif created in the current working directory.

Here's a quick demo: