Tip

Sherlock (debugger) is ready with basic funtionalities like breakpoint, backtrace, single-step, info, print (inspect), etc. Checkout the sherlock directory for more.

I have also written a series of blog on some of the core concepts used in building the debugger. You can find it on my blog site: Writing a Debugger form Scratch

Sherlock Project

Warning

This project is not to be used in production environments. It is intended for educational purposes only. It is my personal project to learn about system programming, tracing, and debugging on Linux x86_64 systems.

This project was not build using any LLMs. Only the Makefile and some parts of the README.md were generated using LLMs.

The purpose of this project is to create a suite of tracing and debugging tools for Linux x86_64 systems. The tools are inspired by popular existing tools like strace, ltrace, and gdb, but are implemented from scratch to provide a deeper understanding of how these tools work under the hood.

This repository contains source code for the following tracers:

1. watson: A system call tracer for Linux x86_64, inspired by strace.
2. irene: A library call tracer for Linux x86_64, inspired by ltrace.
3. sherlock: A debugger for Linux x86_64, inspired by gdb.

For notes and other information, please open the individual directories, which contain their own README.md files.

Build

The binary will be created in the build directory in the root of the project. You can either build the tracers individually or all at once. For building all at once, run:

make all

To build individual tracers, use:

make watson
make irene
make sherlock

Or you can also open the individual directories and run make there.

To run the programs - ./build/<tracer> --help

For PID attachment mode you will need sudo privileges.

Sherlock

Sherlock in use