While many operating systems seem to try to prevent you from peeking under the hood, Unix and Linux positively encourage it. One great tool that we’ve looked at before is strace. Using this tool, you ...

The strace command lets you see what a process is doing, how it is interacting with the operating system. It monitors system calls and signals. As others have pointed out, using strace’s output can be ...

The start of each line (e.g., execve, brk and arch_prctl) shows the system call being made. To run strace against a running process to see what it’s doing, use the command with the -p option followed ...

Debugging and profiling are critical skills in a developer's toolbox, especially when working with low-level system applications. Whether you're tracking down a segmentation fault in a C program or ...