Strace -- The Sysadmin's MicroscopeSometimes as a sysadmin the logfiles just don't cut it, and to solve a problem you need to know what's really going on. That's when I turn to strace -- the system-call tracer. A system call, or syscall, is where a program crosses the boundary between user code and the kernel. Fortunately for us using strace, that boundary is where almost everything interesting happens in a typical program. The two
