Description

The dtrace command provides a generic interface to all of the essential services provided by the DTrace facility, including:

• Options to list the set of probes and providers currently published by DTrace

• Options to enable probes directly using any of the probe description specifiers (provider, module, function, name)

• Options to run the D compiler and compile one or more D program files or programs written directly on the command-line

• Options to generate anonymous tracing programs (see Chapter 15, Anonymous Tracing)

• Options to generate program stability reports (see Chapter 18, Stability)

• Options to modify DTrace tracing and buffering behavior and enable additional D compiler features (see Chapter 10, Options and Tunables)

dtrace can also be used to create D scripts by using it in a #! declaration to create an interpreter file (see Chapter 9, Scripting). Finally, you can use dtrace to attempt to compile D programs and determine their properties without actually enabling any tracing using the -e option, described below.