# strace

9 Hacker News commenters recommended strace and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Recommended for finding out why a program is not behaving as expected by showing the system calls it makes; people call it simpler than BPF for that job. No recurring criticism.

## Why people recommend it

- Useful for debugging unexpected behavior (2 comments): "strace - because it's so incredibly useful when trying to find out why something isn't working as you might expect." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49123388)) "Tools such as strace, eBPF, lsof, ss, etc. have tremendous value." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50039674))
- Good fit for tracing system calls (2 comments): "Way simpler than BPF, especially when all you want to see is syscalls." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47569772)) "for something like this strace is a really good fit" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48138375))
- Works on many programs and dependencies (2 comments): "Tools like strace work just fine on my lisp interpreter" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48623162)) "use strace to find the runtime library dependencies" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48637628))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [DTrace](https://hackerapproved.com/p/dtrace.md): 12 recommend
- [bpftrace](https://hackerapproved.com/p/bpftrace.md): 6 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "strace", https://hackerapproved.com/p/strace/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).