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grace is a tool for monitoring and annotating syscalls for a given process.

It's essentially a lightweightstrace, in Go, with colours and pretty output.

It's possible to tweak and filter the output to make it quite readable, for example (using-vnmx):

You can also review a summary of encountered syscalls (and sort by various columns):

grace isn't meant to compete withstrace, it's purely meant to be a user-friendly, lightweight alternative. However, the following should provide a rough idea of what is supported ingrace so far.

Over time grace is meant to become a simpler, more readable alternative to strace (strace for dummies?), albeit with reduced functionality/advanced features.

NOTE: Please feel free to add important strace features to this table, I'm working with a limited knowledge of strace.

Grab a statically compiled binary from thelatest release.

Currently only Linux/amd64 is supported. Other architectures coming soon.

If you'd like to implement a new architecture, you can duplicatetracer/sys_amd64.go and convert it to contain the syscall definitions for your arch.

grace -- cat /dev/null# replace 'cat /dev/null' with your program

grace -p 123# replace 123 with your pid# e.g. you could use pgrep to find the pid of a processgrace -p`pgrep ping`

grace -f"name=openat" -- cat /dev/null# you can also look for multiple syscallsgrace -f"name=openat&name=close" -- cat /dev/null

grace -f"name=openat&path=/dev/null" -- cat /dev/null

grace -F -- cat

grace -vnmx -- cat /dev/null

grace -Z -- cat /dev/null

grace -S -- cat /dev/null

If you want to buildgrace yourself instead of using the precompiled binaries, you'll need a recent version of Go (1.19+). Thenmake build is your friend.