Bug bumper

Strace is a useful little program – installed by default on most Linux systems – that allows you to take a look at the system calls used by an application. Don't be misled by the name: strace doesn't provide a stack trace – it just reports on system calls.

If you are having problems with a homegrown application – or with any application that offers you access to the source code – you can use strace to help determine where a program is crashing or what problems it is having. Even if you are not tracing a problem, strace is useful because it can help you find out more about what your system is doing, which can sometimes help with performance tuning and resource management.

In this article, I'll help you get started with strace by examining a pair of "Hello World" programs – one in Perl (a scripting language) and one in C (a compiled language). Next month, I'll cover some more advanced situations and take a deeper look into the strace output.

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