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7.203. strace

Updated strace packages that fix several bugs and add various enhancements are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
The strace utility intercepts and records the system calls that are made and received by a running process and prints a record of each system call, its arguments, and its return value to standard error output or a file. It is often used for problem diagnoses, debugging, and for instructional purposes.

Note

The strace packages have been upgraded to upstream version 4.8, which provides a number of bug fixes and enhancements over the previous version. (BZ#919101, BZ#1056828)

Bug Fixes

BZ#919101, BZ#1056828
This update adds several new command-line options: "-y" to print file descriptor paths, "-P" to filter system calls based on the file descriptor paths, and "-I" to control how interactive strace is.
A new command-line utility, strace-log-merge, has been added. This utility can be used to merge timestamped strace output into a single file.
The strace utility now uses optimized interfaces to extract data from the traced process for better performance.
The strace utility now provides improved support for decoding of arguments for various system calls. In addition, a number of new system calls are supported.
BZ#877193
Previously, the strace utility incorrectly handled the return value from the shmat() system call. Consequently, the return value displayed was "?" instead of the address of the attached shared memory segment. This bug has been fixed, and strace now displays the correct return value for the shmat() system calls.
Users of strace are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these bugs and add these enhancements.