There are a ton of Interney Relay Chat (IRC) clients for Linux/Ubuntu, e.g. Gaim (now called Pidgin). One IRC client that makes recording an IRC conversation pretty easy is Irssi. Install Irssi on Ubuntu with a simple command:

sudo apt-get install irssi

Then run the program “irssi” from the command line.
Now suppose you want to record what’s going on in the #iphone channel, which runs on the IRC server irc.osx86.hu. Pick a nickname for yourself such as “notanewbie” and run the following commands:

irssi
/set nick notanewbie
/set autolog on
/connect irc.osx86.hu
/list
/join #iphone

Then just leave the terminal running or type “/quit” when you’re ready to exit. The IRC chat log will automatically be placed in ~/irclogs/osx86/#iphone.log . The chat log includes messages when people join/leave the channel, so you can use this command to peruse what people are actually saying:

cat \#iphone.log | egrep -v ‘has quit|has left|has joined’ | less

That should get you recording an IRC channel. For example, if you wanted to record the Webmaster Radio channel from webmasterradio.fm, you’d type “/connect irc.webmasterradio.fm” in the “/connect” line above, and then use “/join #webmasterradio” to join that channel and record it. So the commands would be:

irssi
/set nick notanewbie
/set autolog on
/connect irc.webmasterradio.fm
/list
/join #webmasterradio

If you join multiple channels, you can switch between them with -#, where # is a number like 0-9


Recording an IRC channel on Linux/Ubuntu - Read More...