suggestions for improving strace command

[armijnhemel]

For our paper we used the following strace options:

strace -e trace=file,process,dup,dup2,close,pipe,pipe2,fcntl -q -f -s 512

The -e option might be useful to reduce the amount of data that is stored. We actually stored quite a bit of data (512 bytes) per trace call. I don't clearly remember if that was too much or not, but since the paths in the Nix store can be quite long I think that's why ;-)

[pombredanne]

Thanks!
I will have to check if 512 bytes is enough. I parse extensively the results, and a truncated output may results in rather unpredictable outputs. I also keep track of processes forks and dir changes and renames.... so limiting the syscalls traced is not a super easy, but doable task.

[armijnhemel]

All the trace options mentioned will include that data :)