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Comment by yan | Hacker News Reader

If you feel that lsof is the swiss army knife of unix debugging, then you haven't done much serious unix debugging. Don't get me wrong, lsof is useful and even indispensable in some situations, but not exactly be-all-end-all.

DTrace fits that description much closer, even though its only available for OpenSolaris, OS X, I believe FreBSD has a port and Linux is getting one.

edit: also see: strace, ltrace, gdb, truss

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Two swiss knives for me then. One in the right pocket, the other in the left. ;)

Gonna write about strace in one of the next articles. And possibly also about dtrace in another article.

Thats the first thing that came to my mind when I read it as well. DTrace (and strace to a lesser extent) are the first things which come to mind whenever you've got to debug anything or atleast get a clue about whats going on in a runaway process.

You'd use SystemTap for kernel-level tracing and breakpoint debugging on Linux. Check the wiki for a bunch of useful pre-cut tap files.

Linux does indeed have a port of dtrace, but it's not legal due to Sun's license.

OS X has a port of DTrace, so I doubt licensing is a big issue.

What he meant to say is that it's not legal because of Linux's license.

Not at all. The GPL is a much older license than the Sun CDDL, which mainly seems to have been created to stop any useful code from Solaris entering Linux.

OS X's kernel (Mach) isn't GPL licensed.

Yeah, the headline is a poor analogy for an otherwise well-written and useful atricle.

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