strace traces (intercepts) system calls and signals of a specific programs. Thus, it is a valuable debugging tool. strace does not need the source code of the examined program. strace writes to stderr by default. grep, the output can be redirected like so: $ strace … 2>&1 | grep …
-o command line option. strace can attach to is controlled by the kernel.yama.ptrace_scope kernel parameter. sudo sysctl kernel.yama.ptrace_scope = 0