macosstracetrussdtruss

How to trace system calls of a program in Mac OS X?


I wanted to trace the system calls made by the find command to debug some performance issues however I could not figure out how to do this on Mac OS X Yosemite. How can I trace system calls for an arbitrary program similarly to what strace does on FreeBSD? I am especially interested in tracing file-system related calls.


Suggested accepted answer doesn't work for me. This is what I tried:

cd ~
cp /usr/bin/find find
codesign --remove-signature ./find
sudo dtruss ./find …

error:

codesign --remove-signature ./find
sudo dtruss ./find 
dtrace: system integrity protection is on, some features will not be available

dtrace: failed to execute ./find: Could not create symbolicator for task

Solution

  • You can use dtruss like in

    sudo dtruss find ~/repo -depth 2 -type d -name '.git'
    

    The manual page of that utility will help you to tailor the use of the tool to your needs.