strace Command Examples

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

• Start tracing a specific process by its PID:

strace {{[-p|--attach]}} {{pid}}

• Trace a process and filter output by system call [e]xpression:

strace {{[-p|--attach]}} {{pid}} -e {{system_call,system_call2,...}}

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

strace {{[-p|--attach]}} {{pid}} {{[-c|--summary-only]}}

• Show the time spent in every system call and specify the maximum string size to print:

strace {{[-p|--attach]}} {{pid}} {{[-T|--syscall-times]}} {{[-s|--string-limit]}} {{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 forked and child processes, saving the output to a file:

strace {{[-f|--follow-forks]}} -e trace=network {{[-o|--output]}} {{trace.txt}} {{program}}