Red Hat Knowledgebase

The command strace is used to trace system calls and signals. It is a great process to use when debugging an application and is often requested by Red Hat technicians to examine certian issues that may arise with an operating system.

To record the system calls used by the ls command and output it to a file called /tmp/trace_ls, execute the following command:

$strace -o /tmp/trace_ls /bin/ls

Please note, without the -o filename option, the command will output to standard output (the terminal screen). This makes for a very long output and will often scroll off the screen making it harder to see the full contents of the strace.