Search code examples
ccommand-line-argumentsstraceltrace

Giving command line arguments to executable being run with ltrace/strace


The title says it all friends!

How do I give command line arguments to an executable whose execution I want to monitor using ltrace/strace ?

For example, if the executable is 'a.out' and I want to store ltrace's output in a file 'out.txt' and 'arg1' is a command line argument that I want to pass to the execuable, then the command I tried is this "ltrace ./a.out -o arg1 out.txt"

The problem is my program is designed to work only for a single command line argument, so when I run the above command, my program interprets this as multiple command line arguments and stops execution after printing a "Usage" message (it is actually designed to do this but here I want to monitor the library calls it is making).

Can someone please help me out ? Thanks in advance. :)


Solution

  • Try passing -o before the command to execute:

    ltrace -o out.txt ./a.out arg1
    

    This way ltrace will get -o out.txt and then will exec a.out, passing to it the rest of the command line.