Re: Why can't I strace some processes?

[Mike Coleman]

Ian Stirling <[e-mail]> writes:
> Details: Kernel 2.4.11 strace 4.4 (neither of these seem critical.
> http://www.edonkey2000.com/files/ed2k_linux_gui_0.1alpha.tar.gz Has a binary
> of a p2p client for linux.  It's closed-source, and has a number of issues.
> In attempts to find workarounds for these, I attempted to strace the
> process, and it diddn't quite work.
> 
> It only ever traces syscalls made by the process that originated the
> clone call, never resultant processes, even with -f set.
> Attempring to connect and trace the resultant processes causes strace to
> exit immediately, sometimes STOPing the process that was attempted to
> be traced.

AFAIK, strace 4.4 doesn't know how to trace clone/threads.  I think they're
working on adding the capability.  If you're desperate, you can try
subterfugue, which can trace clone/threads, although it's alpha code and has
some other problems.  (There's a debian package, or see www.subterfugue.org.)

Mike