alt Hacker NewsYeah, it seems like it could be implemented as a postprocessor of strace --decode-fds. Knowing what each syscall does isn't really the hard part of strace, it's knowing which ones are important, which ones are part of libc itself and can usually be ignored (e.g. collecting /etc/localtime) and which are explicitly requested by the application, piecing together multi-threaded/multi-process logic, etc. strace has a lot of functions to help with that which this doesn't support, like syscall filtering, struct decoding, and stack tracing.
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Agreed, I'm a bit underwhelmed by intentrace when compared to the richness of strace. For sure, strace could maybe benefit from some UX like colorised output and a TUI that lets you filter syscalls while it is running.
>Knowing what each syscall does isn't really the hard part of strace, it's knowing which ones are important, which ones are part of libc itself and can usually be ignored
An excellent point!
More broadly, since many/most Linux/Unix/etc, programs use one or more libraries (which in turn could use one or more other libraries, etc., etc.), then one very important key for designers of any type of strace program, present or future, is:
Can the traced system calls be set granularly, such that the individual libraries making syscalls (as opposed to the main program!) be identified individually, and possibly filtered in/out from the results accordingly?
So, an excellent point!