Can be run as a script `ftrace` if my_command is substrituted with "$@" It is useful when running a command that fails and you have the feeling it is accessing a file you are not aware of. Show Sample Output

similar to the previous command, but with more friendly output (tested on linux)

Sometimes a program refuses to read a file and you're not sure why. You may have display_errors turned off for PHP or something. In this example, fopen('/var/www/test/foo.txt') was called but doesn't have read access to foo.txt. Strace can tell you what went wrong. E.g., if php doesn't have read access to the file, strace will say "EACCESS (Permission denied)". Or, if the file path you gave doesn't exist, strace will say "ENOENT (No such file or directory)", etc. This works for any program you can run from the command-line, e.g., strace python myapp.py -e open,access... Note: the above command uses php-cli, not mod_php, which is a different SAPI with diff configs, etc. Show Sample Output

Especially for sysadmins when they don't want to waste time to add -p flag on the N processes of a processname. In the old school, you did ; pgrep processname and typing strace -f -p 456 -p 678 -p 974... You can add -f argument to the function. That way, the function will deal with pgrep to match the command-line. Example : processname -f jrockit

Depending on the TERM, the terminfo version, ncurses version, etc.. you may be using a varied assortment of terminal escape codes. With this command you can easily find out exactly what is going on.. This is terminal escape zen! ( 2>&2 strace -f -F -e write -s 1000 sh -c 'echo -e "initc\nis2\ncnorm\nrmso\nsgr0" | tput -S' 2>&1 ) | grep -o '"\\[^"]*"' --color=always "\33]4;%p1%d;rgb:%p2%{255}%*%{1000}%/%2.2X/%p3%{255}%*%{1000}%/%2.2X/%p4%{255}%*%{1000}%/%2.2X\33\\\33[!p\33[?3;4l\33[4l\33>\33[?12l\33[?25h\33[27m\33(B\33[m" Lets say you want to find out what you need to echo in order to get the text to blink.. echo -e "`tput blink`This will blink`tput sgr0` This wont" Now you can use this function instead of calling tput (tput is much smarter for portable code because it works differently depending on the current TERM, and tput -T anyterm works too.) to turn that echo into a much faster executing code. tput queries files, opens files, etc.. but echo is very strait and narrow. So now you can do this: echo -e "\33[5mThis will blink\33(B\33[m This wont" More at http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html Show Sample Output

Useful to recover a output(stdout and stderr) "disown"ed or "nohup"ep process of other instance of ssh. With the others options the stdout / stderr is intercepted, but only the first n chars. This way we can recover ALL text of stdout or stderr Show Sample Output

Like the original version except it does not include the parent apache process or the grep process and adds "sudo" so it can be run by user.

Will open strace on all apache process, on systems using sbin/apache (debian) or sbin/httpd (redhat), and will follow threads newly created.

The stap script is : #! /usr/bin/env stap probe syscall.* { if (pid() == target()) printf("%s %s\n", name, argstr); } Show Sample Output

Usefull tool for debug process. Show Sample Output

How to figure out what a program is doing. -tt detailed timestamps -f also strace any child processes -v be very verbose, even with common structures -o write output to file -s N capture up to N characters of strings, rather than abbreviating with ...

On debian parent process is running as root, workers as www-data. You can run strace in backgroud, get its PID, curl your webpage, kill strace and read your stats.

Nginx (and other webservers like Apache) can be awkward to trace. They run as root, then switch to another user once they're ready to serve web pages. They also have a "master" process and multiple worker processes. The given command finds the process IDs of all Nginx processes, joins them together with a comma, then traces all of them at once with "sudo strace." System trace output can be overwhelming, so we only capture "networking" output. TIP: to kill this complex strace, do "sudo killall strace". Compare with a similar command: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/11918/easily-strace-all-your-apache-processes Show Sample Output

No need for grep or xargs