Mastering Go - Second Edition

The strace tool

The strace(1) command-line utility allows you to trace system calls and signals. As strace(1) only works on Linux machines, this section will use a Debian Linux machine to showcase strace(1).

The output that strace(1) generates looks like the following:

$ strace ls
execve("/bin/ls", ["ls"], [/* 15 vars */]) = 0
brk(0)                                  = 0x186c000
fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=35288, ...}) = 0
  

The strace(1) output displays each system call with its parameters as well as its return value. Please note that in the UNIX world, a return value of 0 is a good thing.

In order to process a binary file, you will need to put the strace(1) command in front of the executable you want to process. However, you will need to interpret the output ...