How can I find out what a command is executing in Terminal on MacOs

Question

Hi,

After I run a shell script (which call a bunch a other scripts depend on conditions. which is too complicated to understand), I can execute a command 'gdbclient' at my MacOS terminal.

But when I do 'which gdbclient' and 'alias gdbclient', it shows nothing. Is there anyway for me to find out what 'gdbclient' is actually doing?

Answer 1

You can open up another terminal window and type: ps

That will list all the running processes.

If your script is running as a different user than the current one, you can use ps -ef to list all running processes.

If you know the PID of the process that ran your script, you can find all child processes via parent PID using ps -f | grep [pid]

Answer 2

You can use the Activity Monitor to check things out pretty thoroughly. To get the right privileges to see everything going on you can do:

sudo open /Applications/Utilities/Activity\ Monitor.app/

Answer 3

Dtrace can give you some helpful information: dtrace

Answer 4

to find process 'gdbclient':

ps aux | grep gdbclient

That wont tell you what it's "doing" but that it's running