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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-29T07:41:51+00:00

I’m trying to intercept the openat() system call on Linux using a custom shared

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I’m trying to intercept the openat() system call on Linux using a custom shared library that I can load via LD_PRELOAD. An example intercept-openat.c has this content:

#define _GNU_SOURCE
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <dlfcn.h>

int (*_original_openat)(int dirfd, const char *pathname, int flags, mode_t mode);

void init(void) __attribute__((constructor));
int openat(int dirfd, const char *pathname, int flags, mode_t mode);

void init(void)
{
        _original_openat = (int (*)(int, const char *, int, mode_t))
                dlsym(RTLD_NEXT, "openat");
}

int openat(int dirfd, const char *pathname, int flags, mode_t mode)
{
        fprintf(stderr, "intercepting openat()...\n");
        return _original_openat(dirfd, pathname, flags, mode);
}

I compile it via gcc -fPIC -Wall -shared -o intercept-openat.so intercept-openat.c -ldl. Then, when I run this small example program:

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    int fd;
    fd = openat(AT_FDCWD, "/home/feh/.vimrc", O_RDONLY);
    if(fd == -1)
        return -1;
    close(fd);
    return 0;
}

The openat() call is re-written via the library:

$ LD_PRELOAD=./intercept-openat.so ./openat 
intercepting openat()...

However, the same does not happen with GNU tar, even though it uses the same system call:

$ strace -e openat tar cf /tmp/t.tgz .vimrc  
openat(AT_FDCWD, ".vimrc", O_RDONLY|O_NOCTTY|O_NONBLOCK|O_NOFOLLOW|O_CLOEXEC) = 4
$ LD_PRELOAD=./intercept-openat.so tar cf /tmp/t.tgz .vimrc

So the custom openat() from intercept-openat.so is not being called. Why is that?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It uses the same system call, but apparently it does not call that via the same C function. Alternatively, it could be that it does, but it’s statically linked.

    Either way, I think you’ve proved that it never dynamically links a function names “openat”. If you still want to pursue this option, you might like to see if it links against a specific version of that function, but that’s a long shot.

    You can still intercept the system call by writing your program to use ptrace. This is the same interface used by strace and gdb. It will have a higher performance penalty though.

    http://linux.die.net/man/2/ptrace

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