Adapt the strace command to trace all processes belonging to a specific user

To adapt the strace command to trace all processes belonging to a specific user, you can use the -u option to specify the user. However, strace itself doesn't directly support tracing all processes of a user at once. You'll need to combine ps or pgrep with a loop to achieve this. Here's how you can do it:



#!/bin/bash

get_user_pids() {
    pgrep -u "$1"
}

start_strace() {
    strace -Z -p "$1" &
}

# Main loop
user="username"
while true; do
    pids=$(get_user_pids "$user")
    if [ -z "$pids" ]; then
        echo "No processes found for user: $user"
        sleep 10
        continue
    fi
    for pid in $pids; do
        if ! pgrep -f "strace.*-p $pid" > /dev/null; then
            echo "Tracing PID: $pid"
            start_strace "$pid"
        fi
    done
    sleep 10
done

-Z  Print only syscalls that returned with an error code.
Use man strace to adapt for your needs.

Save this script in a file, for example, monitor_username_activity.sh, and make it executable using the command chmod +x monitor_username_activity.sh.

sudo ./monitor_username_activity.sh

Replace "username" with the actual username of the user whose processes you want to trace. This script will find all processes belonging to that user and trace them using strace.

Make sure to run this script with appropriate permissions, as strace might require elevated privileges to trace some processes. Also, keep in mind that tracing all processes of a user can generate a significant amount of output and may impact system performance.