ktrace is a utility included with certain versions of BSD Unix and Mac OS X that traces kernel interaction with a program and dumps it to disk for the purposes of debugging and analysis. Traced kernel operations include system calls, name translations, signal 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Since Mac OS X Leopard, ktrace has been replaced by DTrace. The identically-named ktrace program in recent macOS versions does not have the same functions as this utility.

See also

• DTrace, Sun Microsystems's trace version, now running on OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, macOS, and Windows

• kdump (Linux), Linux kernel's crash dump mechanism, which internally uses kexec

• SystemTap

• trace on Linux, part of the Linux Trace Toolkit

References