[NTLUG:Discuss] printing bash commands as output

[Robert Citek]

On Dec 7, 2007 12:17 AM, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Dec 07, 2007 at 05:52:56AM +0000, Leroy Tennison wrote:
> > There are situations where it would be nice to document a process and
> > it's results, for example:
...
> > If I redirect the output of a bash script containing the above command
> > pipeline to a file it will contain the results but I won't know what
> > produced the results (the command pipline doesn't end up in the output
> > file).  Is there an easy way to get both?
>
> In bash, try "set -x".  Then every command gets echoed as part of
> the output (preceded by a '+').

set -x does indeed work great.  On trick I use is to put parentheses
around the command sets.  For example:

( set -x ; ls /etc/ ; date ; echo "Hello World" ) >& output.txt

The parentheses ensure that my interactive shell stays sane.

Another tool you might want to explore is script.  It captures
everything you type and that is displayed on the screen to a text
file.  'man script' for more details.

Good luck and let us know what worked for you.

Regards,
- Robert