strace is a diagnostic and debugging utility for examining interactions between Linux processes and the kernel. It records system calls, signals and changes in process state, providing insight into what an application is doing at the operating system level.
Unlike source-level debuggers, strace does not require access to application source code or debugging symbols. This makes it particularly useful for investigating unexpected file access, permission failures, network connection problems and applications that behave differently across systems.
The utility can trace a program from startup or attach to an existing process. Its output identifies system calls, their arguments and returned results, making it possible to investigate failures and understand how applications use kernel services.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Trace system calls and signals generated by individual processes, including applications that are already running.
- Filter system calls by name, regular expression or predefined categories covering files, networking, memory, processes and other operations.
- Restrict tracing to activity involving selected file paths or file descriptors.
- Display information associated with file descriptors, including file paths and socket details.
- Inspect data read from and written to file descriptors, with hexadecimal and ASCII representations.
- Record timestamps, elapsed time and system call execution duration.
- Generate statistical summaries showing system call counts, execution times and errors.
- Filter traced calls according to their return status.
- Follow processes and threads created through operations such as fork, clone and vfork.
- Capture stack traces to help relate system calls to their originating code paths.
- Inject system call failures, modify return values and deliver signals to investigate application error handling.
- Decode system call arguments and results to make low-level kernel interactions easier to interpret.
Website: github.com/strace/strace
Support:
Developer: Dmitry Levin
License: GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1
strace is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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