Neat, though I'm guessing it's pretty slow.<p>Tip for anyone reading: If you only need to trace file accesses or command executions, `eslogger lookup` and `eslogger exec` respectively will give you what you need (albeit in the form of a not-particularly-friendly JSON blob).
Modulo I haven’t tried it yet it’s been an irritant that SIP broke tracing so this is a welcome development, thank you.
This triggered a small emotional reaction. I really miss the days when Apple made real effort toward servers with MacOS X Server and Xserve. Hopefully, since they're using their own hardware/software internally for servers, Apple may one day go back down that road.
Love it. I've never successfully used dtruss without hardlocking my system, so it's nice to see that this isn't a wrapper around that.
Doesn't appear to work, and lacks pypi and brew packaging.<p><pre><code> $ pipx install git+https://github.com/Mic92/strace-macos
installed package strace-macos 0.1.0, installed using Python 3.13.7
These apps are now globally available
- strace
done!
$ strace df -h
Error: Failed to load LLDB Python module.
Make sure you're running with system Python (/usr/bin/python3) and have Xcode Command Line Tools installed.
To install Xcode Command Line Tools:
xcode-select --install
$ sudo strace df -h
[same shit]
</code></pre>
After fixing[0] the awkward python system requirement, it doesn't work with built-in binaries without SIP disabled, it's really slow, it colorizes output even when piping, and the colors are terrible. Better than nothing but it's currently less effort to temporarily disable SIP for dtruss and reenable it later than install this in this early form. Maybe with time it will improve, but it seems like a vehicle to aggressively advertise consulting services.<p>0:<p><pre><code> env PIPX_DEFAULT_PYTHON='/usr/bin/python3' pipx install git+https://github.com/Mic92/strace-macos</code></pre>
It’s working. You deliberately ignored the requirements clearly stated multiple times in the README, which explains that it must use the same version of Python as LLDB because it relies on LLDB's Python bindings. The tool even explained again what you should do instead after you defied the installation instructions, yet you chose to run the same command again with sudo, turning this into a spectacle. This isn’t a software issue. It’s you messing around.<p>> it seems like a vehicle to aggressively advertise consulting services.<p>It's an open source tool that addresses a pain point many people have, made with someone's spare time with no strings attached. What is wrong with you?<p>> it doesn't work with built-in binaries without SIP disabled<p>You can't debug system binaries on macOS with SIP. That's the whole point of SIP. Debugging user binaries is still very much allowed.<p><pre><code> sudo lldb /bin/ls
Password:
(lldb) target create "/bin/ls"
Current executable set to '/bin/ls' (arm64e).
(lldb) r
error: process exited with status -1 (attach failed (Not allowed to attach to process. Look in the console messages (Console.app), near the debugserver entries, when the attach failed. The subsystem that denied the attach permission will likely have logged an informative message about why it was denied.))
</code></pre>
> lacks pypi and brew packaging<p>That's an entitled complaint against a project made just 2 days ago [1], which offers a single line command for installation.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/Mic92/strace-macos/commit/712aaf14d07f2efa48a65e44e03d735242e3b29c" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Mic92/strace-macos/commit/712aaf14d07f2ef...</a>
Silly question but doesn’t macos ship with dtrace? So why not use dtruss?
Barely supported by Apple these days - in addition to needing to disable SIP which is a pain, it was broken causing system freezes for several major macOS releases.
dtruss requires disabling SIP. This seems like a better option for basic "what just happened?" debugging.
You need to disable SIP to use DTrace
Another silly question, did everyone forgot about instruments?
Does instruments allow you to track file reads/writes and other syscalls/mach stuff? Their docs are quite bad at describing the capabilities, so I'm not really sure. From what I can see it's a profiler rather than a tracing tool.
Isn't Instruments built on dtrace?
TIL Nix flakes work on macos - is this a legit alternative to homebrew?
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