ttt

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 "$@"
exec "$@"

But Why?

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?

Since this logs the directory, I can also use it to jump to directories I visit often

This gives me finer control on what gets logged, so I can do analysis on it later from HPI.

How?

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.

Install

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

Tests

cd test
./test

Benchmarks

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

ttt?

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'