Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised May 29, 2026

Ktrace

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.

Last revised
May 29, 2026
Read time
≈ 1 min
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Source
Wikipedia ↗
ktrace
Written inC1
Operating systemBSD Unix and Mac OS X
Available inEnglish
TypeTracing

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.2

Trace files generated by ktrace (named ktrace.out by default) can be viewed in human-readable form by using the kdump utility.3

Since Mac OS X Leopard, ktrace has been replaced by DTrace.4 The identically-named ktrace program in recent macOS versions does not have the same functions as this utility.

See also

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

References

  1. "C source of ktrace utility in FreeBSD". cgit.freebsd.org. Retrieved 2024-03-07.
  2. "ktrace(1) manpage". freebsd.org. 2012-05-31. Retrieved 2014-07-23.
  3. "kdump(1) manpage". freebsd.org. 2014-03-28. Retrieved 2014-07-23.
  4. "What happened to ktrace and kdump". discussions.apple.com. 2008-10-17.