DTRACE: KILL() [WHO KILLED MY PROCESS?]

Body

This small probevue script will let you know who killed your process. Sometimes you might see that a process gets killed for no obvious reason and you have no idea who killed it. Of course here we're not talking about process dying because of a SEGV or SIGBUS, due to programming errors, but a genuine kill.

In the script below you can of course alter the SIGKILL in the '/ ... /' filter by another signal. The script has to be run as root like this:

  # /usr/sbin/dtrace -w -q -o sigkill1.out -s sigkill1.dt

The output file, signal2.out here, might look like this:

  [csh - 10030 - 1] sent SIGKILL to pid 14753

The script is:

/*
 * sigkill1.dt: Find out who send a SIGKILL to a given target.
 *
 * Run as user 'root' using the following command line:
 *
 *     /usr/sbin/dtrace -w -q -o sigkill1.out -s sigkill1.dt
 *
 *
 * dalla
 */

proc:::signal-send
/ (args[2] == SIGKILL) /
{
    printf("[%s - %d - %d] sent SIGKILL to pid %d\n",
           execname, pid, tid, args[1]->pr_pid);
}