strace

strace is a cool open-source tool that’s perfect for developers and system admins. It works as a system call tracer, and guess what? It only runs on GNU/Linux operating systems!

What Does strace Do?

This handy program is great for debugging, learning, and diagnosing issues. It tracks all the system calls made by a program or process and prints out a detailed trace. Just keep in mind that it’s a command-line tool, so you’ll need to run it from a console or terminal emulator app.

Who Can Use strace?

If you're a diagnostician, troubleshooter, or just someone who wants to solve problems with closed-source programs, strace is your new best friend! This software was created by Dmitry V. Levin, Roland McGrath, and Wichert Akkerman.

Command-Line Options Galore!

Like most command-line tools, strace comes loaded with options that let you customize how you use it. To see all these options at once, just type ‘strace --help’ in your terminal.

Cool Features of strace

• Count Calls: You can count the times certain calls are made and track errors too.


• Summarize Latency: Want to know how long syscalls take? This feature has you covered!


• Trace Specific Paths: Focus on tracing accesses to particular paths easily.


• Error Output: Enable debug output directly to stderr if needed.


• Detached Processes: Run the tracer process as a detached grandchild instead of as a parent process.

You can also send trace info to specific files instead of stderr. Need to set tracking overhead? You can do that too! Plus, there are options for managing user permissions and more!

How to Install strace

The only way to get strace is through source tarball distribution. But don’t worry; installing it on various Linux distributions from their main software repositories is super easy! Just grab the latest version from Softpas by clicking here, save the archive wherever you want, then unpack it.

Your next step? Open up your Terminal app and navigate to where you extracted those files (for example: cd /home/softpedia/strace-4.9). From there, run the commands ‘./configure && make’ to set everything up. Finally, execute ‘make install’ as root or ‘sudo make install’ as a privileged user to get strace installed across your system!