How to Trace System Calls and Signals in Linux

There are certain programs in Linux for which the source is not readily available. There is an useful diagnostic, instructional, and debugging tool for Linux to solve it. The system intercepts and records the system calls that are called by process and the signals which are received by a process. It also gives students and hackers a great chance to learn about system and system calls by tracing even ordinary programs. Let’s a pick at the useful tool.

Here’s the simple tool to trace calls and signals

strace <name of the program>

This will output a great amount of data on to the screen. If it is hard to keep track of the scrolling mass of data, then there is an option to write the output of strace to a file instead which is done using the -o option.