NAME
    IO::Trace - Log I/O of an arbitrary process.

SYNOPSIS
      # Simple case:
      use IO::Trace;
      exit iotrace @ARGV;

      # Advanced use:
      use IO::Trace qw(iotrace);
      my $exit_sort = iotrace qw[-f -v -s9000 -tt -e execve,clone,openat,close,read,write -o /tmp/sort.iotrace.log sort];
      warn `wc /tmp/sort.iotrace.log`;
      exit $exit_editor;

DESCRIPTION
    This utility is intended to be used to record STDIN STDOUT STDERR
    actvity (read,write,close) of an arbitrary command which it spawns. It
    does not alter any packets on the streams.

    The log file format is similar to Linux's strace utility but more
    platform-independent. So iotrace should work on Windows, MacOSX,
    GitBash, FreeBSD, Msys2, MinGW, Solaris, Cygwin, ChromeOS, as well as
    Linux.

    This is implemented using IPC::Open3::open3 instead of Linux ptrace.

CAVEATS
    It breaks terminal commands that rely on STDIN being a TTY because it is
    converted into a pipe.

    It will NOT log reads and writes to other files opened during the
    command execution, like strace does. It only logs STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR.

SEE ALSO
    strace - Based on this commandline utility, but this only works on Linux
    platform.

    Capture::Tiny - Similar in that it can log STDOUT and STDERR, but this
    is difficult to capture STDIN.

    IPC::Run - Almost powerful enough to handle what I needed, but it
    couldn't handle detecting closed streams very gracefully, and the STDIN
    exponential backoff heartbeat CODE grinder is too sloppy.

AUTHOR
    Rob Brown, <bbb@cpan.org>

DEVELOPMENT
    This module is maintained on github:

    https://github.com/hookbot/IO-Trace

    Report feature requests or bugs here:

    https://github.com/hookbot/IO-Trace/issues

    Pull requests welcome.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
    Copyright (C) 2026 by Rob Brown

    This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
    under the terms of The Artistic License 2.0.

DISCLAIMER
    Use at your own risk! The author will not be liable for any damages
    caused by misuse of this application nor any illegal monitoring or
    logging of any private communications or data packets or IO streams.

