ltrace never seems to get as much attention as strace: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ltrace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ltrace > ltrace is a debugging utility

ltrace never seems to get as much attention as strace: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ltrace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ltrace > ltrace is a debugging utility in Linux, used to display the calls a userland application makes to shared libraries. This is useful because strace can completely ignore the information you really want. OTOH, ltrace doesn't provide information that's as pretty as what strace shows, because ltrace doesn't know as much about the functions it's showing you. This means arguments passed as pointers will be shown as pointer values, functions will occasionally be shown as taking the wrong number of arguments, and enum values will be shown as ints. ltrace also can't show function calls to functions in statically-linked libraries, because it hooks into the dynamic loading mechanism.