5 simple ways to troubleshoot using Strace

I keep being surprised how few people are aware of all the things they can use strace for. It's always one of the first debug tools I pull out, because it's usually available on the Linux systems I run, and it can be used to troubleshoot such a wide variety of problems. What is strace? Strace is quite simply a tool that traces the execution of system calls. In its simplest form it can trace the ex