Capture historical process history UNIX?

Question

I'm wondering if there a way of capturing a list of the processes executed on a non-interactive shell?

Basically I have a script which calls some variables from other sources and I want to see what the values of said variables are. However, the script executes and finishes very quickly so I can't capture the values using ps.

Is there a way to log processes and what arguments were used?

TIA Huskie

EDIT:

I'm using Solaris in this instance. I even thought about about having a quick looping script to capture the values being passed - but this doesn't seem very accurate and I'm sure executions aren't always being captured. I tried this:

   #!/bin/ksh

   while [ true ]
   do

   ps -ef | grep  $SCRIPT_NAME |egrep -v 'shl|lis|grep' >> grep_out.txt

   done

I'd use sleep but I can't specify any precision as all my sleep executables want an integer value rather than any fractional value.

Answer 1

On Solaris:

truss -s!all -daDf -t exec yourCommand 2>&1 | grep -v ENOENT

On AIX and possibly other System V based OSes:

truss -s!all -daDf -t execve yourCommand 2>&1 | grep -v ENOENT

On Linux and other OSes supporting strace, you can use this command:

strace -ff -etrace=execve yourCommand 2>&1 >/dev/tty | grep -v ENOENT

In case the command you want to trace is already running, you can replace yourCommand by -p pid with pid being the process to be traced process id.

EDIT:

Here is a way to trace your running script(s) under Solaris:

for pid in $(pgrep -f $SCRIPT_NAME); do
    truss -s!all -daDf -t exec -p $pid 2>&1 | grep -v ENOENT > log.$pid.out &
done

Note that with Solaris, you might also use dtrace to get the same (and more).