strace
Ranked 2 of 3 tracing tools by recommenders
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.
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.
9 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 9
- criticize it
- 0
- approval share
- 100%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 9 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- Nobody criticizes itNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Useful for debugging unexpected behavior
“strace - because it's so incredibly useful when trying to find out why something isn't working as you might expect.”
Comment from 31 Jul 2026 in “The Productivity Mirage” “Tools such as strace, eBPF, lsof, ss, etc. have tremendous value.”
Comment from 11 Oct 2026 in “Unikernels were hard. key word: were” Good fit for tracing system calls
“Way simpler than BPF, especially when all you want to see is syscalls.”
Comment from 30 Mar 2026 in “Claude Code runs Git reset –hard origin/main against project repo every 10 mins” “for something like this strace is a really good fit”
Comment from 14 May 2026 in “Myths about /dev/urandom” Works on many programs and dependencies
“Tools like strace work just fine on my lisp interpreter”
Comment from 21 Jun 2026 in “System call instrumentation on Linux/x86‑64 using memory‑indirect calls, part I” “use strace to find the runtime library dependencies”
Comment from 22 Jun 2026 in “Is it time for a new Embedded Linux build system?”
Other tracing tools people recommend
The two most recommended other tracing tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 3 tracing tools, rankedWhat people said
8 of the 9 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Tools such as strace, eBPF, lsof, ss, etc. have tremendous value.”
“strace - because it's so incredibly useful when trying to find out why something isn't working as you might expect.”
“use strace to find the runtime library dependencies”
“Tools like strace work just fine on my lisp interpreter”
“for something like this strace is a really good fit”
“Way simpler than BPF, especially when all you want to see is syscalls.”
“This is a VERY instructive exercise to do in general.”
“it's a bit baroque but I use strace personally”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.