ispy

ispy is a python tool for monitoring the output of terminals and processes.

Demo

ispy watching a bash session that lists some files and opens vim:

The same thing, using strace:

Installation

pip install ispy

Alternatively, if you aren't a Python person or don't want to install it (since it must be run as root), you can download a fully packaged pex file and run without installing:

wget https://github.com/dellis23/ispy/blob/master/bin/pex/ispy.pex?raw=true -O ispy; chmod +x ispy

Usage

# ispy <pid_to_watch>

Use Cases

• Watching someone else's terminal
• Watching the output of a backgrounded process

Notes

Not intended for production!

It's probably buggy.

This was mainly an exercise in learning about ptrace for myself. I haven't done anything more than smoke testing on a couple of operating systems.

This uses the same system call as strace (ptrace), which is heavy-handed and has a performance impact. It is not recommended to use in production or against mission-critical applications. It's also written in Python, so it's even slower.

Supported OSs

This has been tested as working on:

• Ubuntu
• CentOS

This has been tested as not working on:

• OSX

Thanks

Thanks to the creator and maintainers of python-ptrace; this project depends on it.