How to read output from Instruments (OSX command line utility)

Question

This seems so simple I'm embarrassed to ask...

I'm developing code in a command-line-only environment. It seems that OSX has disabled traditional unix profiling, so I tried "instruments":

instruments -t "Time Profiler" -p 63369

This produced a directory "instrumentscli0.trace", full of data, but it doesn't appear to be human-readable data. What can I do with it? (Besides opening it in Instruments.app, which requires a GUI so it isn't useful when I'm remoting into a system.) I imagine the file formats are defined in some framework...

Answer 1

You should be able to log human-readable output from the instruments binary by turning on verbose logging on the console.

$ instruments -v -t "Time Profiler" -p 63369

Optionally, redirect it to a file

$ instruments -v -t "Time Profiler" -p 63369 > readable_output.log