Preface

The DTrace User Guide is a lightweight introduction to the powerful tracing and analysis tool DTrace. In this book, you will find a description of DTrace and its capabilities, as well as directions on how to use DTrace to perform relatively simple and common tasks.

Who Should Use This Book

DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing facility that is built into Solaris. You can use the DTrace facility can be used to examine the behavior of user programs or the behavior of the operating system. DTrace can be used by system administrators or application developers on live production systems.

DTrace allows Solaris developers and administrators to:

Implement custom scripts that use the DTrace facility
Implement layered tools that use DTrace to retrieve trace data

This book is not a comprehensive guide to DTrace or the D scripting language. Please refer to the Solaris Dynamic Tracing Guide for in-depth reference information.

Before You Read This Book

Basic familiarity with a programming language such as C or a scripting language such as awk(1) or perl(1) will help you learn DTrace and the D programming language faster, but you need not be an expert in any of these areas. If you have never written a program or script before in any language, Related Books provides references to other documents you might find useful.

Related Books

For an in depth reference to DTrace, see the Solaris Dynamic Tracing Guide. These books and papers are recommended and related to the tasks that you need to perform with DTrace:

Kernighan, Brian W. and Ritchie, Dennis M. The C Programming Language. Prentice Hall, 1988. ISBN 0–13–110370–9
Mauro, Jim and McDougall, Richard. Solaris Internals: Core Kernel Components. Sun Microsystems Press, 2001. ISBN 0-13-022496-0
Vahalia, Uresh. UNIX Internals: The New Frontiers. Prentice Hall, 1996. ISBN 0-13-101908-2

Documentation, Support, and Training

The Sun web site provides information about the following additional resources:

Typographic Conventions

The following table describes the typographic conventions that are used in this book.

Table P-1 Typographic Conventions

Typeface	Meaning	Example
`AaBbCc123`	The names of commands, files, and directories, and onscreen computer output	Edit your `.login` file. Use `ls -a` to list all files. `machine_name% you have mail.`
`AaBbCc123`	What you type, contrasted with onscreen computer output	`machine_name%` `su` `Password:`
`aabbcc123`	Placeholder: replace with a real name or value	The command to remove a file is `rm` `filename`.
AaBbCc123	Book titles, new terms, and terms to be emphasized	Read Chapter 6 in the User's Guide. A cache is a copy that is stored locally. Do not save the file. Note: Some emphasized items appear bold online.

Shell Prompts in Command Examples

The following table shows the default UNIX system prompt and superuser prompt for the C shell, Bourne shell, and Korn shell.

Table P-2 Shell Prompts

Shell	Prompt
C shell	`machine_name%`
C shell for superuser	`machine_name#`
Bourne shell and Korn shell	`$`
Bourne shell and Korn shell for superuser	`#`