You can try it yourself by running &quot;strace&quot; on itself, e.g.:<p><pre><code>  strace -f strace -f ls
</code></pre>
I guess this isn&#x27;t possible because the kernel developers only envisioned ptrace to be useful for debugging (they supposedly didn&#x27;t think about sandboxing applications), and implementing a &quot;recursive&quot; version of ptrace is probably more difficult.