strace Command Examples

Troubleshooting tool for tracing system calls. More information: https://manned.org/strace.

• Start tracing a specific [p]rocess by its PID:

strace -p {{pid}}

• Trace a [p]rocess and filt[e]r output by system call:

strace -p {{pid}} -e {{system_call,system_call2,...}}

• Count time, calls, and errors for each system call and report a summary on program exit:

strace -p {{pid}} -c

• Show the [T]ime spent in every system call and specify the maximum string [s]ize to print:

strace -p {{pid}} -T -s {{32}}

• Start tracing a program by executing it:

strace {{program}}

• Start tracing file operations of a program:

strace -e trace=file {{program}}

• Start tracing network operations of a program as well as all its [f]orked and child processes, saving the [o]utput to a file:

strace -f -e trace=network -o {{trace.txt}} {{program}}