My new best friend: strace

[Siddhesh Poyarekar]

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 8:54 PM, Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-05-10 at 07:45 -0500, Richard Shaw wrote:
>> There was so much information flying past it took me a minute but I
>> starting seeing some other libraries that it was not finding so after
>> yumming those in it finally worked!
>
> On a related note, just wondering, and someone else will probably have
> to answer this:  Would using strace show an application trying to find
> libraries that it could make use of, but doesn't actually need?
>
> I remember doing this sort of diagnosing back in my Amiga days, and it
> was common for applications to try and see what was available for it,
> and you'd see "not founds" for all sorts of optional extras.  Which was
> perfectly fine, so long as you weren't hoping to use one of those
> optional extras.
>

I am assuming that the libraries you're talking about are probably the
dynamically loaded ones so yes, you can see them in an strace too. If
not found, they will return a ENOENT, again assuming that the app
tries out a list of known plugins rather than simply loading
everything from a predefined directory. Try out an strace of an app
that uses plugins like pidgin, to see how it comes up.


-- 
Siddhesh Poyarekar
http://siddhesh.in