logit - selective logging of commands from a Bash shell

I spend a lot of time running custom scripts on datasets in a unix bash shell - typically I'm running various tools on DNA and protein sequence datasets. I need to try different tools, edit files and change parameters.

I wanted a way to capture those commands that worked and ignore all the others that simply listed directories, ran the editor, etc. Cutting and pasting from the shell history was really inefficient and the output of script was too voluminous.

To solve this I have written logit - a tool that lets you selective log commands and comments to a file while you work in a shell.

logit consists of a Ruby script and an associated bash shell script. When you run 'logit start' it creates a custom bash sub shell that you do your work in.

You can log comments to the log file with:
$ logit 'here is a comment'
And you log the last command you ran with just:
$ logit
There are other options to help you log commands further back in your history.

The resulting log file contains only those commands and comments that you chose to log. As such it serves as a concise record of a work session and may form the basis for an executable script in itself.

The regular Bash history mechanism is does not allow you to record lines from your history in a files. I'm not clear why but the cleanest solution I could come up with was the pairing of a Ruby and a Bash script. In practice you only ever deal with the Ruby script.

The code is distributed freely under the MIT license and can be found on Github at https://github.com/craic/logit