How to capture the xtrace output (only) in a file

auditperformancetracingzsh

I know that I can redirect the xtrace output to some_file with something like this:

exec 2 >> some_file
set +x

…but this sends to some_file not only the xtrace output, but also any other content originally sent to fd 2, which includes most error messages and warnings, all unrelated to xtrace.

Is there a way to capture only the xtrace output in some_file?

I should add that I'm looking for a way to do this that would distort as little as possible the xtrace output itself, and the timing information gathered through a PS4 setting like, e.g.

zmodload zsh/datetime
export PS4='${(j::)epochtime} %N:%i> '

Best Answer

Might not be the solution you are looking for, but having run into a similar scenario in the past, my go-to is to write a python parser to take the trace file, and output only the data I care about into a resulting file. As long as the patterns of the "garbage text" that you don't care about are predictable/differentiable from the xtrace output, the parsing should be extremely easy to do.

Example - grabbing a trace of all IOs across all submission queues for 20 min test consisting of reads and writes results in a 40GB-70GB file, but after parsing the data I care about out of it, my result file is only ~1-3GB in size, and actually usable for analysis and visualization. Granted, with such large file sizes, it takes a server-class system ~15-30 min to process through it all, but doing the same process (separate scenario, same idea - multiple logs each only about 24kb) - I can get all of the data from all logs into a single consumable file in under 2 seconds.

All that to say, it might be worth it to add a post-processing step that might add a few seconds/minutes to the overall capture, rather than waiting for a one-stop-shop.

Best of luck!

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