strace — Trace System Calls and Signals

Author:
RMS (Richard M Stallman) Founder of GNU Projects and Free Software
Foundation (FSF). URL: http://www.stallman.org/

One Day One Command
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strace — Trace System Calls and Signals.

Summary:

In the simplest case strace runs the specified command until it exits.
It intercepts and records the system calls which are called by a
process and the signals which are received by a process.  The name of
each system call, its arguments and its return value are printed.
strace is a useful diagnostic, instructional, and debugging tool.


Examples:

$ strace sleep 1 — Trace all Sys call of ‘sleep’ command.

$ strace ls — Trace all Sys call of ‘ls’ command.

$ strace -i sleep 1 — Print the value of the Instruction Pointer at
                      every sys call.

$ strace -r sleep 1 — Print a relative time-stamp with each line of
                      the trace.

$ strace -t sleep 1 — Prefix each line of the trace with the time of
                      day.

$ strace -T sleep 1 — Show time spent on each call.

$ strace -o file sleep 1 — Redirect the output to a file.

$ strace -c ls — Count  time,  calls, and errors for each system call
                  and report a summary on program exit.

$ strace -xx myprg — Print all strings in HEX format.

$ strace -e trace=file ls — Trace all system calls which take a
                            filename as an argument.

$ strace -e trace=process ls — Trace all system calls which involve
                               process management.

$ sleep 60 & — Dummy background Job.

$ strace -p 1234 — Attach to the process with the PID 1234 (use
                   dummy job’s Pid) and trace.

Read: man strace

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