TRACE-CMD(1)

💅 TRACE-CMD — like, the whole libtracefs manual, bestie

okay so real talk: trace-cmd is the command that interacts with the Ftrace Linux kernel internal tracer, and this is the libtracefs manual page for it. welcome to the group chat 🫶

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

trace-cmd COMMAND [OPTIONS]

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

The trace-cmd(1) command interacts with the Ftrace tracer that is built inside the Linux kernel. it interfaces with the Ftrace specific files found in the debugfs file system under the tracing directory. and yes, a COMMAND must be specified to tell trace-cmd what to do — no command, no vibes, no trace. periodt.

👑 COMMANDS 👑

bestie there are so many of these and each one ate:

• record — record a live trace and write a trace.dat file to the local disk or to the network. main character energy fr.
• set — set a ftrace configuration parameter.
• report — reads a trace.dat file and converts the binary data to a ASCII text readable format.
• stream — Start tracing and read the output directly
• profile — Start profiling and read the output directly
• hist — show a histogram of the events.
• stat — show tracing (ftrace) status of the running system
• options — list the plugin options that are available to report
• start — start the tracing without recording to a trace.dat file.
• stop — stop tracing (only disables recording, overhead of tracer is still in effect)
• restart — restart tracing from a previous stop (only effects recording)
• extract — extract the data from the kernel buffer and create a trace.dat file.
• show — display the contents of one of the Ftrace Linux kernel tracing files
• reset — disables all tracing and gives back the system performance. (clears all data from the kernel buffers)
• clear — clear the content of the Ftrace ring buffers.
• split — splits a trace.dat file into smaller files.
• list — list the available plugins or events that can be recorded.
• listen — open up a port to listen for remote tracing connections.
• agent — listen on a vsocket for trace clients
• setup-guest — create FIFOs for tracing guest VMs
• restore — restore the data files of a crashed run of trace-cmd record
• snapshot — take snapshot of running trace
• stack — run and display the stack tracer
• check-events — parse format strings for all trace events and return whether all formats are parseable
• convert — convert trace files
• attach — attach a host trace.dat file to a guest trace.dat file
• dump — read out the meta data from a trace file

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -h, --help — Display the help text. that's it, that's the whole option list 💀

Other options see the man page for the corresponding command. iykyk — each command has its own lil page with its own lil flags.

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

go read these, no cap:

trace-cmd-record(1), trace-cmd-report(1), trace-cmd-hist(1), trace-cmd-start(1), trace-cmd-stop(1), trace-cmd-extract(1), trace-cmd-reset(1), trace-cmd-restore(1), trace-cmd-stack(1), trace-cmd-convert(1), trace-cmd-split(1), trace-cmd-list(1), trace-cmd-listen(1), trace-cmd.dat(5), trace-cmd-check-events(1), trace-cmd-stat(1), trace-cmd-attach(1)

💜 AUTHOR 💜

Written by Steven Rostedt, <rostedt@goodmis.org[1]> — shoutout to the icon who made all this happen 👑

🌈 RESOURCES 🌈

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

🍓 COPYING 🍓

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

⭐ NOTES ⭐

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

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okay that's the whole page, ily, go trace something gorgeous 💖 this lil masterpiece comes courtesy of libtracefs, dated 03/09/2026 — mwah, bye bestie! 🌸