How to trace system calls of a program in Mac OS X?

macos strace truss dtruss
Michaël Le Barbier picture Michaël Le Barbier · Jun 25, 2015 · Viewed 56.3k times · Source

I wanted to trace the system calls made by the find command to debug some performance issues however I could not figure out how to do this on Mac OS X Yosemite. How can I trace system calls for an arbitrary program similarly to what strace does on FreeBSD? I am especially interested in tracing file-system related calls.

Answer

jspcal picture jspcal · Jun 25, 2015

You can use dtruss like in

sudo dtruss find ~/repo -depth 2 -type d -name '.git'

The manual page of that utility will help you to tailor the use of the tool to your needs.

Related questions

Equivalent of strace -feopen < command > on mac os X

This is useful for debugging (hence programming related). On linux, we can use the command strace -feopen python myfile.py to figure out which python modules and shared objects are loaded. Is there an equivalent one-liner on macOS X?

Read More
How can I get dtrace to run the traced command with non-root priviledges?

OS X lacks linux's strace, but it has dtrace which is supposed to be so much better. However, I miss the ability to do simple tracing on individual commands. For example, on linux I can write strace -f gcc hello.…

Read More
ltrace equivalent for osx?

osx has the really powerful dtrace/ktrace/dtruss tools - however i'm not willing to invest the time necessary to learn dealing with them right now. what's the easiest way to get the equivalent functionality of linux ltrace (and possibly …

Read More