Logs metadata for shell scripts/invocations; an extension to my shell history.
This is essentially a wrapper script to store metadata. The wrapper script ttt
takes any other command as input, stores some metadata about it in a history file, and then runs the command as normal. Its quite literally:
#!/bin/sh
tttlog "$@"
exec "$@"
Shell history is nice, but not all commands are run directly through the shell - so its not possible to track them. If you have some keybinding to launch a script/application, or force-quit the terminal without exiting, your commands don't get saved in your shell history.
This also provides me with context; like what directory was this command run in?
When I started using z
, also made it incredibly easy to create an initial database with years of history
This gives me finer control on what gets logged, so I can do analysis on it later from HPI
.
This consists of:
ttt
(the wrapper shell script)tttlog
(log metadata to the history file)
At the top of any shell script which I want to log, I add something like:
command -v tttlog >/dev/null 2>&1 && tttlog "$(basename "$0")" "$@"
(... that way it doesn't error if tttlog
isn't installed)
If I'm launching the command with a keybinding or from another program that accepts a command as input (e.g. rifle
(my file manager) or from my window manager
, I'd modify the line from:
# launch firefox
bindsym $mod+f exec firefox-developer-edition
... to ...
bindsym $mod+f exec ttt firefox-developer-edition
That does mean that the command would fail if ttt
isn't installed, but I'm willing to live with that.
If this can't find the current working directory (i.e. if you deleted the current directory and called it from there), it sets -
, which signifies an error.
I recommend you symlink #!/bin/sh
to something faster than bash
, like dash
, to improve startup times. See here
for more info.
An example of what this logs to the CSV file:
1599523021,/home/sean/Repos/ttt,nvim ./tttlog.go
1599523446,/home/sean,alacritty
1599523626,/home/sean,keepassxc
One could also just use this to log generic events. tttlog
just saves whatever arguments you pass it with some metadata about where/when, so could be used to track habits/my behaviour like:
#!/bin/sh
# every minute, if I'm watching something, save what movie/music I'm listening to
# using my https://github.com/seanbreckenridge/mpv-sockets script
while true; do
if MEDIA_PATH="$(mpv-currently-playing)"; do
tttlog "mpv_playing_media:$MEDIA_PATH"
fi
sleep 60
done
For examples of where this is used in my dotfiles, see here.
Requires go
git clone "https://github.com/seanbreckenridge/ttt" && cd ./ttt
make
or with bpkg
: bpkg install -g seanbreckenridge/ttt
You can change which file tttlog
writes to by setting the TTT_HISTFILE
environment variable. The default location is ${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME/.local/share}/ttt_history.csv
cd test
./test
Just to have some numbers here, the overhead that ttt
(wrapper shell script running tttlog
) causes is about 3ms
Benchmark #1: /bin/sh
Time (mean ± σ): 0.6 ms ± 0.3 ms [User: 0.5 ms, System: 0.4 ms]
Range (min … max): 0.0 ms … 1.5 ms 1621 runs
Benchmark #2: printf hi >/dev/null
Time (mean ± σ): 0.1 ms ± 0.1 ms [User: 0.2 ms, System: 0.2 ms]
Range (min … max): 0.0 ms … 1.3 ms 1935 runs
Benchmark #3: /home/sean/Repos/ttt/test/../ttt printf hi >/dev/null
Time (mean ± σ): 3.8 ms ± 0.7 ms [User: 2.3 ms, System: 2.3 ms]
Range (min … max): 2.3 ms … 5.8 ms 522 runs
Naming things relating to shell history/logging is hard...
I just wanted something that would be easy to type, so I can add it to wherever I want quickly. Is just the first thing that came to mind, when I was trying to figure out how to track rifle/i3 bindsyms; 'track the things'