This post is a walk-through of the simple strace implementation I wrote during my GopherCon talk, A Go Programmer’s Guide to Syscalls . You’ll find the code here . To explore some of the features of the I thought it would be fun to write my own implementation of a basic — a tool that shows which an executable uses. This article is a quick breakdown of how the program works. If you have time, there’s more detail and colour in the talk: Linux ptrace syscall strace syscalls I added a boolean called to keep track of whether it’s an exit or entry, and simply flipped its state each time through the for loop. I only count the syscall on exit. Here’s the loop, including keeping track of the exit. exit for {if exit {err = syscall.PtraceGetRegs(pid, &regs)if err != nil {break} name, \_ := sec.ScmpSyscall(regs.Orig\_rax).GetName()  
    fmt.Printf("%s\\n", name)  
}

err = syscall.PtraceSyscall(pid, 0)  
if err != nil {  
    panic(err)  
}

\_, err = syscall.Wait4(pid, nil, 0, nil)  
if err != nil {  
    panic(err)  
}

exit = !exit } Summing up the syscalls I wrote some to keep count of the number of times each syscall code is used, and to print out a summary. utility code Et voilà If you try this out you’ll see this gives something that corresponds to what gives us. Here’s a very short demo showing the output from this code when we use it on , and the output from for the same thing. You’ll see they show the same counts for each syscall. strace echo hello strace -c _https://github.com/lizrice/strace-from-scratch_asciinema.org Strace from scratch demo The full implementation also shows the parameters for each syscall. If you wanted to build out our simple version to do this, we could . map them from other registers In the talk I went on to demonstrate how you can use the . You can try this out for yourself by uncommenting the call to . This is really just to give an idea of what happens when you use seccomp filters — I wouldn’t recommend that everyone should start handcrafting code within production applications to determine which syscalls they can call! If you like the idea of self-sandboxing applications, you should by . seccomp security module to prevent specific syscalls disallow() check out this talk Jessie Frazelle Massive thanks for the inspiration and information in @nelhage ’s implementation of strace in C and Michał Łowicki ’s deep dives into making a debugger in Go, and to everyone at Gophercon who made me feel so welcome.

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Strace in 60 lines of Go

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