TRACE-CMD-AGENT(1)

📦
version 3.4 · 12 versions
, in arch rolling

🎀 TRACE-CMD-AGENT(1) 🎀

okay so real quick, this page lives in the libtracefs Manual and honestly? it's giving "let my bestie drive your machine" energy. stay with me, it's gonna slay 💅

✨ NAME ✨

trace-cmd-agent — run as an agent on a machine, so another machine can control it 🫶

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

trace-cmd agent [OPTIONS]

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so trace-cmd(1) has this agent mode, right? it literally just sits there and listens — either over a vsocket (that's the virtual-machine vibe 🧚) or a TCP port — waiting for connections that wanna control tracing on this machine.

then when someone connects, the agent starts tracing on the local machine and passes the data over to that controlling connection. no cap, that's the whole job. 👑

✨ OPTIONS ✨

  • -N client — listen over TCP instead of a vsocket. you gotta pass in a client host name or IP address to allow the connection to, and it will only connect to that specified client. fair warning tho: any process on that client can control the agent.
⚠️ This is a very insecure setting. Only use on a trusted network. ⚠️ Only use if the client machine is totally trusted. like, totally totally.
  • -p port — specifies the port to listen to. that's it, that's the option 🎀
  • -D — sends trace-cmd agent into daemon mode so it runs in the background. bye bestie, you're on your own now 😭
  • -P cid — lets an agent also act as a proxy server, so it can run on a host and connect with a guest. cid is the context ID (peep vsock(7)) of the client (e.g. a guest VM) that it will allow to connect. very main character of it ✨
  • --verbose[=level] — sets the log level. supported log levels are "none", "critical", "error", "warning", "info", "debug", "all" — or their identifiers "0", "1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6". setting the log level to a specific value enables all logs from that level and all previous levels. if you don't specify one, the level defaults to "info".

example — enable all critical, error and warning logs:

trace-cmd listen --verbose=warning

✨ SEE ALSO ✨

trace-cmd(1), trace-cmd-record(1), trace-cmd-report(1), trace-cmd-start(1), trace-cmd-stop(1), trace-cmd-extract(1), trace-cmd-reset(1), trace-cmd-split(1), trace-cmd-list(1)

like, the whole friend group fr fr 💖

✨ AUTHOR ✨

written by Steven Rostedt, <rostedt@goodmis.org[1]> 🌈

✨ RESOURCES ✨

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/trace-cmd/trace-cmd.git/

go look, it's iconic 👑

✨ COPYING ✨

Copyright (C) 2010 Red Hat, Inc. free use of this software is granted under the terms of the GNU Public License (GPL). periodt. 💅

✨ NOTES ✨

  1. rostedt@goodmis.org mailto:rostedt@goodmis.org

and that's the whole page bestie!! 🦋 this beauty is from libtracefs, dated 03/09/2026 — go forth and trace responsibly, mwah 💜🌸

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