NAME

execsnoop - snoop new process execution. Uses DTrace.

SYNOPSIS

execsnoop [-a|-A|-ejhsvZ] [-c command]

DESCRIPTION

execsnoop prints details of new processes as they are executed. Details such as UID, PID and argument listing are printed out.

This program is very useful to examine short lived processes that would not normally appear in a prstat or "ps -ef" listing. Sometimes applications will run hundreds of short lived processes in their normal startup cycle, a behaviour that is easily monitored with execsnoop.

Since this uses DTrace, only users with root privileges can run this command.

OPTIONS

-a: print all data
-A: dump all data, space delimited
-e: safe output, parseable. This prevents the ARGS field containing "\n"s, to assist postprocessing.
-j: print project ID
-s: print start time, us
-v: print start time, string
-Z: print zonename
-c command: command name to snoop

EXAMPLES

Default output, print processes as they are executed,: # execsnoop
Print human readable timestamps,: # execsnoop -v
Print zonename,: # execsnoop -Z
Snoop this command only,: # execsnoop -c ls

FIELDS

UID: User ID
PID: Process ID
PPID: Parent Process ID
COMM: command name for the process
ARGS: argument listing for the process
ZONE: zonename
PROJ: project ID
TIME: timestamp for the exec event, us
STRTIME: timestamp for the exec event, string

DOCUMENTATION

See the DTraceToolkit for further documentation under the Docs directory. The DTraceToolkit docs may include full worked examples with verbose descriptions explaining the output.

EXIT

execsnoop will run forever until Ctrl-C is hit.

AUTHOR

Brendan Gregg [Sydney, Australia]