OSNews

"Recently I inheritted ownership of an SVN server which was misbehaving. Trying to determine why it wasn't working correctly involved a few hours of testing, careful thought, and caffeine. Eventually I got it working correctly using the often-overlooked tool strace. strace is a common tool upon many GNU/Linux systems including Debian. Put simply strace is a 'system call tracer' - which is where it gets its name from. Using strace, as root, you can monitor the system calls made by any process upon your system. This can be enormously beneficial when you have a misbehaving program."