While many operating systems seem to try to prevent you from peeking under the hood, Unix and Linux positively encourage it. One great tool that we’ve looked at before is strace. Using this tool, you ...

Debugging and profiling are critical skills in a developer's toolbox, especially when working with low-level system applications. Whether you're tracking down a segmentation fault in a C program or ...

Both strace and ltrace are powerful command-line tools for debugging and troubleshooting programs on Linux: Strace captures and records all system calls made by a process as well as the signals ...

One of the nice things about Linux and similar operating systems is that you can investigate something to any level you wish. If a program has a problem you can decompile it, debug it, trace it, and — ...

Sandra Henry-Stocker was a programmer, Linux systems administrator, security engineer and Linux journalist for most of her 30-year career. She describes herself as "USL" (Unix as a second language) ...