CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashshellautostart
kromy
kromy

Reputation: 33

.bashrc file is looping "script" command

I'm trying to set up a little shell script using the linux command "script" to log every input on my Kali Linux machine.

#!/bin/bash
now=$(date +"%m_%d_%Y_%H:%M:%S")
script /root/Logs/log_$now.txt

The script itself seems to work but i want to add it to the bash autostart, so whenever i open a terminal, my shellscript gets executed.

I tried adding it to my .bashrc file but when I open a terminal now, the script gets looped. I added a simple "echo 'test'" script and it only starts once on terminal launch. Adding the script to my .profile file and executing .profile manually works as intended, but as soon as i enter a script using the "script" command to my .bashrc, it gets looped.

Thank you in advance.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1671

Answers (2)

chepner
chepner

Reputation: 531175

A new terminal window is one way of starting a new interactive shell, but so is running script. You only want to run script in the first case, not in every case.

script itself sets a variable in the environment to let you know if you are already in a shell started by script. Check for that variable before trying to run script again.

if [[ -z $SCRIPT ]]; then
    now=$(date +"%m_%d_%Y_%H:%M:%S")
    script /root/Logs/log_$now.txt
fi

The value of SCRIPT, if set, is the name of the file being logged to.

Alternatively, you can configure your terminal emulator to run script directly, rather than having it continue to open an ordinary interactive shell and you trying to alter its configuration.

The above applies to BSD script; for GNU script, you'll have to set such a variable yourself.

if [[ -z $SCRIPT ]]; then
  now=$(date +"%m_%d_%Y_%H:%M:%S")
  export SCRIPT=/root/Logs/log_$now.txt
  script "$SCRIPT"
fi

Upvotes: 5

Gunther Schadow
Gunther Schadow

Reputation: 1739

The script(1) command opens a new interactive shell.

The file .bashrc runs on every interactive bash shell that is started, hence your infinite recursion.

If you want something to run only on the login shell, you put it into .bash_profile.

This should avoid the infinite recursion.

Upvotes: 2

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