JSTACK(1)

💅 JSTACK(1) — the JDK Commands era

okay bestie, listen up, this one's a whole thing — it's jstack, and it lives in the JDK Commands corner of the manual. no cap, she's iconic but also a little experimental, so buckle up 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

jstack — print Java stack traces of Java threads for a specified Java process 🫶

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

ngl, read this first: this command is experimental and unsupported. 💀

jstack [options] pid

• options — this represents the jstack command-line options. see Options for the jstack Command below, bestie 👇
• pid — the process ID for which the stack trace is printed. the process must be a Java process, no exceptions. to get a list of Java processes running on a machine, use either the ps command or, if the JVM processes aren't running in a separate docker instance, the jps command. literally that's the whole vibe check 🦋

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so what does jstack actually do? she prints Java stack traces of Java threads for a specified Java process — main character energy fr fr 👑

for each Java frame, the full class name, method name, byte code index (BCI), and line number, when available, are printed. all of it, laid out for you ✨

here's the tea on C++ names though: C++ mangled names aren't demangled. 😭 to demangle C++ names, the output of this command can be piped to c++filt. and when the specified process is running on a 64-bit JVM, you might need to specify the -J-d64 option, for example:

jstack -J-d64 pid

⚠️ note, and this one's important: this command is unsupported and might not be available in future releases of the JDK. 😬 in Windows Systems where the dbgeng.dll file isn't present, the Debugging Tools for Windows must be installed so that these tools work. the PATH environment variable needs to contain the location of the jvm.dll that is used by the target process, or the location from which the core dump file was produced. like, it needs to. no shortcuts 🙈

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🌸 OPTIONS FOR THE JSTACK COMMAND 🌸

okay so there's literally only two of these and they both slay in their own way 💅

• -l — the long listing option prints additional information about locks 🔥 lowkey the useful one tbh
• -h or -help — prints a help message. classic, reliable, never misses 🫶

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and that's the whole page, bestie — you ate that 💖

JDK 27-ea, dated 2026, signing off — this has been your friendly neighborhood manual page, stay slay, stay jstack-ing ✨👑