Still doesn't tell me what dtrace does.

brodney · on Jan 31, 2014

Read this: http://blog.bignerdranch.com/1907-hooked-on-dtrace-part-1/

Xdes · on Jan 31, 2014

Or you could just give a concise definition:

    >What is this "DTrace" thing? It stands for "Dynamic Tracing",
    >a way you can attach "probes" to a running system
    >and peek inside as to what it is doing.

brodney · on Jan 31, 2014

It was my mistake to link you to a tutorial on the thing you are asking about. I don't know what came over me.

dunham · on Jan 31, 2014

It's like awk, except that you match entry/exit of syscalls, function calls, method invocations (in ObjC/Java), and give code to execute with access to arguments, return values, stack trace, etc.

It can be used to write tools like strace (see "dtruss" on OSX), iotop, topsyscall, etc.

Someone · on Jan 31, 2014

On Mac OS X, the way to get an idea of what dtrace can do is "apropos dtrace". That shows you the dtrace scripts that the OS ships with.