ktrace is a utility included with certain versions of BSD Unix and Mac OS X that traces kernel interaction with a program and dumps it to disk for the purposes of debugging and analysis. Traced kernel operations include system calls, name translations, signal processing, and I/O.[2]
| Written in | C[1] |
|---|---|
| Operating system | BSD Unix and Mac OS X |
| Available in | English |
| Type | Tracing |
Trace files generated by ktrace (named ktrace.out by default) can be viewed in human-readable form by using the kdump utility.[3]
Since Mac OS X Leopard, ktrace has been replaced by DTrace.[4] The identically-named ktrace program in recent macOS versions does not have the same functions as this utility.
See also
- DTrace, Sun Microsystems's trace version, now running on OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, macOS, and Windows
- kdump (Linux), Linux kernel's crash dump mechanism, which internally uses kexec
- SystemTap
- trace on Linux, part of the Linux Trace Toolkit