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Solutions for tracing UNIX applications

Martin Brown (mc@mcslp.com), Professional writer, Freelance

Martin Brown has been a professional writer for over eight years. He is the author of numerous books and articles across a range of topics. His expertise spans myriad development languages and platforms -- Perl, Python, Java, JavaScript, Basic, Pascal, Modula-2, C, C++, Rebol, Gawk, Shellscript, Windows, Solaris, Linux, BeOS, Mac OS/X and more -- as well as Web programming, systems management and integration. Martin is a regular contributor to ServerWatch.com, LinuxToday.com and IBM developerWorks, and a regular blogger at Computerworld, The Apple Blog and other sites, as well as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) for Microsoft. He can be contacted through his Web site at http://www.mcslp.com.

Summary: If you are developing a UNIX® application, then you can trace and debug the running application and extract the information you need from it. But what if you want to know what is going on inside a UNIX application and you don't have access to the source code?This tutorial looks at some systems that enable you to trace the execution of applications and work out what they are doing without having to make any modifications to the source code, and even without having to stop and restart the application.

Date: 31 Mar 2009
Level: Intermediate
PDF: A4 and Letter (66 KB | 24 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity: 44162 views
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Summary

Conclusion

Tracing, and the need to trace your application, can come from many different areas. As a developer, tracing an application can be a quicker alternative than resorting to a full debugger when you are trying to diagnose a problem. Tools like DTrace can be even more intrusive and retrieve some very specific, and extensive, information about your application.

For administrators, tracing provides the only method for locating and finding the information that you need to diagnose problems. Without access to the source code, tracing is often your only means of determining what an application is doing. This tutorial showed that with tracing alone, you can find and diagnose problems with just a few commands.

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