Print a stack trace of running processes
pstack pid [...]
pstack attaches to the active processes named by the pids on the command line, and prints out an execution stack trace, including a hint at what the function arguments are. If symbols exist in the binary (usually the case unless you have run strip(1)), then symbolic addresses are printed as well.
If the process is part of a thread group, then pstack will print out a stack trace for each of the threads in the group.
pstack currently works only on Linux, only on an x86 machine running 32 bit ELF binaries (64 bit not supported). Also, for symbolic information, you need to use a GNU compiler to generate your program, and you can't strip symbols from the binaries. For thread information to be dumped, you have to use the debug-aware version of the LinuxThreads libpthread.so library. (To check, run nm(1) on your pthreads library, and make sure that the symbol "__pthread_threads_debug" is defined.) Threads are not supported with the newer NPTL libpthread.so library.
nm(1), ptrace(2)
Ross Thompson <[email protected]>
Red Hat, Inc. <http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla>