How to use strace ?

Posted by e-satis on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by e-satis
Published on 2008-10-06T16:07:41Z Indexed on 2010/03/25 21:23 UTC
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linux

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debug

A collegue told me once that the last option when everything has failed to debug on linux was to use strace.

I tried to learn the science there is behind this strange tool but I am not a system admin guru and I Don't really get results.

So what is it exactly and what does it do ?

How to use it ? In which case ?

How to understand the output and process it ?

In brief, how does this stuff work ? In simple words.

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