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.
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).
For things that run on Linux and other Unices yes.
For macOS UI programs and those that need specific permissions and for commercial programs stick with Homebrew but you can define what you want in homebrew in nix.
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.
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.
Doesn't appear to work, and lacks pypi and brew packaging.
$ 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]
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.
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.
Neat, though I'm guessing it's pretty slow.
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).
TIL Nix flakes work on macos - is this a legit alternative to homebrew?
Yes. It's great. Especially paired with nix-darwin which allows you to declaratively manage all your macos settings too
Sort of.
For things that run on Linux and other Unices yes.
For macOS UI programs and those that need specific permissions and for commercial programs stick with Homebrew but you can define what you want in homebrew in nix.
Modulo I haven’t tried it yet it’s been an irritant that SIP broke tracing so this is a welcome development, thank you.
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.
The bug for this was fixed in Tahoe
For the whole dtrace system?
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
Not entirely. You can selectively remove protections:
csrutil enable --without 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?
Doesn't appear to work, and lacks pypi and brew packaging.
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.0: