strace/strace

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

2677 stars · 498 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

strace is a diagnostic, debugging, and instructional userspace utility for Linux that traces system calls, signal deliveries, and process state changes via ptrace. It provides a traditional command-line interface for monitoring and tampering with interactions between processes and the Linux kernel.

Use cases

• trace system calls made by a program
• debug why a process is failing or hanging
• find out which files a program opens
• inspect signals delivered to a process
• learn how programs interact with the Linux kernel
• diagnose permission or missing-file errors

When to choose

• you need to see what system calls a Linux process makes
• you are debugging crashes, hangs, or file access issues on Linux
• you want a lightweight, standard syscall tracer without extra dependencies

When to avoid

• you need syscall tracing on non-Linux platforms (use dtruss/dtrace instead)
• you need application-level or source-level debugging rather than syscall-level
• you need low-overhead continuous production tracing (ptrace adds overhead)

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

developer-tools monitoring tracing developer-tools operating-systems cli syscall-tracing ptrace debugging system-calls process-monitoring command-line linux

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