ktrace is a

utility In economics, utility is a measure of a certain person's satisfaction from a certain state of the world. Over time, the term has been used with at least two meanings. * In a normative context, utility refers to a goal or objective that we wish ...

included with certain versions of

BSD Unix The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginni ...

and

Mac OS X macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

that

traces Traces may refer to: Literature * ''Traces'' (book), a 1998 short-story collection by Stephen Baxter * ''Traces'' series, a series of novels by Malcolm Rose Music Albums * ''Traces'' (Classics IV album) or the title song (see below), 1969 * ''Tra ...

kernel Kernel may refer to: Computing * Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems * Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution * Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming * Kernel method, in machine learnin ...

interaction with a program and dumps it to disk for the purposes of

debugging In engineering, debugging is the process of finding the Root cause analysis, root cause, workarounds, and possible fixes for bug (engineering), bugs. For software, debugging tactics can involve interactive debugging, control flow analysis, Logf ...

and analysis. Traced kernel operations include

system call In computing, a system call (syscall) is the programmatic way in which a computer program requests a service from the operating system on which it is executed. This may include hardware-related services (for example, accessing a hard disk drive ...

s, name translations,

signal A signal is both the process and the result of transmission of data over some media accomplished by embedding some variation. Signals are important in multiple subject fields including signal processing, information theory and biology. In ...

processing, and I/O. Trace files generated by ktrace (named by default) can be viewed in human-readable form by using the kdump utility. Since

Mac OS X Leopard Mac OS X Leopard (version 10.5) is the sixth software versioning, major release of macOS, Apple Inc., Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. Leopard was released on October 26, 2007, as the successor of Mac OS X Ti ...

, ktrace has been replaced by

DTrace DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework originally created by Sun Microsystems for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time. Originally developed for Solaris, it has since been released un ...

. The identically-named ktrace program in recent macOS versions does not have the same functions as this utility.

References

{{unix-stub Unix programming tools

See also

References