v0.5.1

Changes since v0.5.0:

Fix an incorrectly placed continue statement that causes tracee to hang when SIGALRM is sent to tracee.

v0.5.0 featuring data export and user-level profile

Changes since v0.4.1:

Features

The exec events can now be collected and saved as JSON stream or JSON format!
This feature is implemented by the new collect subcommand.

The JSON stream format is newline-delimited JSONs and when --pretty(which prettifies the JSON) is not enabled,
it is also a JSON Lines text file.
The first JSON of the JSON stream contains metadata like tracexec version and baseline environment information.
Other JSONs are exec events.

The JSON format is a big JSON object that contains metadata and an array of exec events in the events field.

And, tracexec now supports user-level profile🎉!

The profile file is a toml file that can be used to set fallback options.
It should be placed at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/tracexec/ or $HOME/.config/tracexec/ and named config.toml.

A template profile file can be found at https://github.com/kxxt/tracexec/blob/main/config.toml

Note that the profile format is not stable yet and may change in the future. You may need to update your profile file when upgrading tracexec.

Other changes

• Add --profile and --no-profile to load non-default profile and ignore profile, respectively.
• Update dependencies.
• Internal: Add a ruby script to update README.
• Internal: Some refactor work.

v0.4.1

Changes since v0.4.0:

• Update dependencies, notably:
  • rataui to v0.27.0, and its friend crates
  • shell-quote to v0.7.1. The escape of utf8 characters is now better.
  • chore: run cargo update to get rid of yanked bytes 1.6.0
• Perf: Log Mode: Don't accumulate msgs on unbounded channel
• Docs: Update crate description

v0.4.0: tracexec can now be used as a debugger launcher!

I am very excited to share that tracexec can now be used as a debugger launcher.

It's usually not trivial or convenient to debug a program executed by a shell/python script(which can use pipes as stdio for the program).
The following video shows how to use tracexec to launch gdb to debug two simple programs piped together by a shell script.

gdb-launcher.mp4

Solves:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5048112/use-gdb-to-debug-a-c-program-called-from-a-shell-script
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1456253/gdb-debugging-with-pipe
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/455544/how-to-load-program-reading-stdin-and-taking-parameters-in-gdb
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65936457/debugging-a-specific-subprocess

To learn more about it, read the gdb-launcher example.

Changes since v0.3.1:

Added

• Breakpoints.
  • The breakpoints can be set in CLI(--add-breakpoint/-b) and TUI.
• Managing breakpoint hits.
  • in CLI: option --default-external-command
  • in TUI: Hit Manager
  • Detach, Resume, or Detach, stop and run external command
• --tracer-delay option for setting the polling delay of the tracer, in microseconds. The default is 500 when seccomp-bpf is enabled, otherwise 1.

Changed

• Docs: make the description of --seccomp-bpf more clear

v0.3.1

tracexec v0.3.1 released!

Changes since v0.3.0:

Fixed

• TUI: Fix a bug that the event list is not refreshed when new events are available in some cases.

v0.3.0

tracexec v0.3.0 released!

Changes since v0.2.2:

Added

• Shell completions are now available for bash, elvish, fish, powershell and zsh!
  • Run tracexec generate-completions <SHELL> to get the completion file to install for your favorite shell.
  • Or generate completions when packaging tracexec so that users don't need to install the completions themselves.
• TUI: Toggle showing/hiding CWDS by pressing W.
• Musl builds are now available for x86_64 and aarch64.
• TUI: Add Ctrl+U key binding to bottom help text, which clears the text in the search bar when editing it.

Changed

• TUI: To optimize memory usage(avoiding storing a contiguous string separately),
  the internal regex implementation is switched to regex-cursor from regex.
• TUI: The order of the key bindings in the bottom help text is changed.

Fixed

• Fix build issues on musl.
• TUI: Fix search result not being updated after toggling show/hide CWD/Env.
• TUI: Stop following when navigating through the search results.
• TUI: Fix incorrect wrapping behavior of the bottom key binding help text by updating ratatui and use NBSPs.
• TUI: Fix crash when resizing the terminal by updating ratatui.

Performance

• Store more information as cached arcstr to reduce memory usage.
• Other optimizations to reduce memory usage.

v0.3.0-alpha.1

tracexec v0.3.0-alpha.1 released!

Changes since v0.2.2:

Added

• Shell completions are now available for bash, elvish, fish, powershell and zsh!
  • Run tracexec generate-completions <SHELL> to get the completion file to install for your favorite shell.
• TUI: Toggle showing/hiding CWDs by pressing W.
• Musl builds are now available for x86_64 and aarch64.

Fixed

• Fix build issues on musl.

v0.2.2

tracexec v0.2.2 released!

Changes since v0.2.1:

Fixed

• Fix a race condition in the communication between the tracer and the TUI.
• TUI: Change the modifier key that toggles case sensitivity and regex/plain text in the search bar from Ctrl to Alt
  because in most terminals, Ctrl+I is equivalent to Tab thus the toggle is not working as expected.
• Clarify that the license is GPL-2.0-or-later in Cargo.toml(was GPL-2.0).

Performance

• Keep a global cache of env keys/values to reduce memory usage.

Other

• Mark tests that need to be run single-threaded with serial_test crate so that we don't need to set RUST_TEST_THREADS=1 when running tests.

v0.2.1

tracexec v0.2.1 released!

Changes since v0.2.0:

• TUI: Fix a bug that when switching to follow mode, the event list is not scrolled to the bottom immediately.

v0.2.0

tracexec v0.2.0 released!

Changes since v0.1.0:

Added

• TUI: The events can now be searched from a search bar(Ctrl+F).
  • Both case-sensitive and case-insensitive(default) are supported.
  • Both plain text(default) and regex search are supported.
• TUI: Show status icons for events.
• TUI: Show process status for exec events in details popup.
• TUI: More help text in the help dialog (F1).

Changed

• Tracer: Automatically resolve /proc/self/exe symlink filename. (Use --no-resolve-proc-self-exe to disable)
• Log Mode: Control whether to set terminal foreground process group with --foreground/--no-foreground.
• TUI: don't show terminal cursor when terminal is not focused.
• Tweak log levels.

Fixed

• Tracer: handle pid reuse correctly.
• TUI: Correctly handle unicode in the event list.
• TUI: Don't crash when inputting some control codes into the pseudo terminal(e.g. Ctrl+4).
• Log Mode: print new child with green pid.
• Don't set terminal foreground process group in tests.
• Add missing help text for --no-decode-errno.
• Fix CI for publishing to crates.io (excluding /sceeenshots from the package because it's too large)