What can I use to capture every command I run in bash (a-la history)

Question

I know history will capture commands that I run, but it is shell specific. I work with multiple shells and multiple hosts and would like to write a small script which, after every command I run, dumps that command to some file along with the host name. This way, i can implement my own history command which reads from that file, and can take a host as an argument which would be handy for me. I'm not sure how to get the first part though..ie, get every shell command I type to trigger a "dump that command into a file" part. Any ideas?

Thanks

Answer 1

In bash, the PROMPT_COMMAND environment variable contains a command that will be executed before the PS1 prompt is displayed. So yours could be something like history | tail -n1 | perl -npe 's/^\\s+\\d+\\s+//' | yourcommand HOST history | tail -n1 | perl -npe 's/^\\s+\\d+\\s+//' | yourcommand HOST

Answer 2

The script utility should solve your problem. It records everything you type and all that is printed on the terminal in a file (even including terminal control codes, so if you cat that file on the console, you even reproduce the original text colors).