Many systems allow you to inspect a running process with a
system call tracer. For example:
# trace -p process-id (SunOS 4)
# strace -p process-id (Linux and many others)
# truss -p process-id (Solaris, FreeBSD)
# ktrace -p process-id (generic 4.4BSD)
Even more informative are traces of system library calls.
Examples:
# ltrace -p process-id (Linux, also ported to FreeBSD and BSD/OS)
# sotruss -p process-id (Solaris)
See your system documentation for details.
Tracing a running process can give valuable information about
what a process is attempting to do. This is as much information as
you can get without running an interactive debugger program, as
described in a later section.
