Monitor all newly spawned processes on a Linux machine

Question

Sometimes a process comes and goes faster than I can ps aux, I tried watch -d -n0.1 "ps aux | tail" but again, that's restricted to 1/10th of a second. What I really want is to run a command and follow all new processes, one per line, as they spawn. Even processes that run fast. I know strace has abilities similar to this but I haven't been able to get it to do what I want.

tl;dr : is there a way to log all new processes?

I don't want to know much, no more than a line of ps aux would give me, for the current case I just have a process that's spawned by another and disappears, I want to be able to run it, but I don't know what the command would be. Even knowing new PIDs would be sufficient, since I could figure a script that would take these and run ps | grep on these and give me more info while the process is running (assuming hopefully the process is still around when ps gets going)

Answer 1

What do you want to know about those processes? If you can control who spawns the processes, strace -feprocess $SHELL will do.

If it's just an overview of their footprint, use process accounting (in the gnu acct package; use the lastcomm command), or higher-level tools like atop's logger mode. In the future, tools like trace and uprobes will be helpful to get detailed info out of the kernel.

Answer 2

auditd?

http://linux.die.net/man/8/auditctl