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strace

Diagnostic tool for tracing system calls and signals.

strace attaches to a running process or starts a new one and records every system call it makes, with arguments and return values. It is the standard Linux tool for understanding what a program is doing when source code is not available, for debugging I/O and permission problems, and for studying how applications interact with the kernel.

It uses the ptrace syscall and is available on every major Linux distribution.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install strace
Fedora:        sudo dnf install strace
Arch:          sudo pacman -S strace