How to trace a program from its very beginning without running it as root

Question

I\'m writing a tool that calls through to DTrace to trace the program that the user specifies.

If my tool uses dtrace -c to run the program as a subprocess of DTrace, no

Answer 1

This script takes the name of the executable (for an app this is the info.plist's CFBundleExecutable) you want to monitor to DTrace as a parameter (you can then launch the target app after this script is running):

string gTarget;     /* the name of the target executable */

dtrace:::BEGIN
{
    gTarget = $$1;  /* get the target execname from 1st DTrace parameter */

    /*
    * Note: DTrace's execname is limited to 15 characters so if $$1 has more
    * than 15 characters the simple string comparison "($$1 == execname)"
    * will fail. We work around this by copying the parameter passed in $$1
    * to gTarget and truncating that to 15 characters.
    */

    gTarget[15] = 0;        /* truncate to 15 bytes */
    gTargetPID = -1;        /* invalidate target pid */
}

/*
* capture target launch (success)
*/
proc:::exec-success
/
    gTarget == execname
/
{
    gTargetPID = pid;
}

/*
*   detect when our target exits
*/
syscall::*exit:entry
/
    pid == gTargetPID
/
{
    gTargetPID = -1;        /* invalidate target pid */
}

/*
* capture open arguments
*/
syscall::open*:entry
/
    ((pid == gTargetPID) || progenyof(gTargetPID))
/
{
    self->arg0 = arg0;
    self->arg1 = arg1;
}

/*
* track opens
*/
syscall::open*:return
/
    ((pid == gTargetPID) || progenyof(gTargetPID))
/
{
    this->op_kind = ((self->arg1 & O_ACCMODE) == O_RDONLY) ? "READ" : "WRITE";
    this->path0 = self->arg0 ? copyinstr(self->arg0) : "<nil>";

    printf("open for %s: <%s> #%d",
        this->op_kind,
        this->path0,
        arg0);
}