Record and replay shell commands.

I often found myself in a situation where I set up my work environments by executing some (identical) sequences of commands. While you might suggest that just keeping a tmux session open might be the way to go, that was not a good option for technical reasons. The script command might have been an option but I find it somewhat awkward to use. So instead I wrote this ~130 line bash script to record, store and replay repetative shell commands to save me from the dreads of repetition.

Without further ado, let's get to an example. Here's how you store a record (command sequence):

user@host ~
$ vcr-record
[recording...]

user@host ~
$ module load cmake llvm cuda

user@host ~
$ cd /my/project/dir

user@host /my/project/dir
$ . some-environemtn

user@host /my/project/dir
$ vim -p file1.cc file2.cc
-- open vim, then quit

user@host /my/project/dir
$ vcr-label myproject-src
[stored record under label 'myproject-src']

After setting up your environment with vcr-record and storing it with vcr-label you can replay it like this:

user@host
$ vcr-play myproject-src
[playing record...]
[done]
# current dir is now /my/project/dir and vim is opened with file1.cc and file2.cc

Copy the vcr.bash somewhere and source it in your ~/.bashrc (or ~/.bash_profile on macOS). If there's any demand, support for more shells might follow.

Yes, that's essentially all there is to it. There's some convenience commands to manage and preview your records and tab-completion for the appropriate commands but the whole thing is kept lightweight.

• vcr-record, starts a recording if not already recording
• vcr-abort, abort and discard the current recording session
• vcr-recording, prints a message about whether you are recording
• vcr-label <name>, close current recording and save it under <name>
• vcr-list, list all records
• vcr-delete <name>, delete the record <name>
• vcr-clear, delete all records
• vcr-show <name>, print all commands in record <name>
• vcr-play <name>, execute all commands in record <name> in current shell

All commands with a <name> arguments provide tab-completion

You could:

1. Use the script command to open a new shell, save it to a file and then source it the next time. I personally think it's kind of a hassle and you have to remember where you store your scripts.

2. Keep a tmux session open with a set up environment. That is not always possible on remote machines and in addition I noticed you kind of get angsty about ever closing that tmux session.

3. Write your own shellscript with the required commands by hand and source it on every start. That's the manual version of the script variant and comes with all the drawbacks and no additional benefits.

4. I don't know, if you can think of something nicer let me know :)

MIT @ Alexander Matz