[lug] cool tool

[llornkcor]

I just wanted to tell everyone what a cool tool strace is.
:o)
I recently fried my /usr partition ~DOH~
I am a 'single' user computer, so no _real_ biggie.
No backups. So, I installed stuff, and got around to realplayer7, of all things.
When I tried to run it (from an xterm). Nothing. Absolutely nothing. No usual
linux error messages that it couldn't find something. Blank. Then I remembered
about strace. For those of you that are new to linux, strace is a tool to call
like this- 
strace /usr/local/RealPlayer7/realplay
that will output all of the system calls that the called program makes.
Try it on something. Anything, you'll 'magically' see all the calls made to *.so
files, and such. It will show you any files that it calls, and can or cannot
find. In this case, it was looking for G2 codecs (even after deleting
ld.so.cache, and running ldconfig), in a directory that didn't exist. So to fix
it, i simply made a symlink. 
ln -s /usr/local/RealPlayer7 /usr/lib/RealPlayerG2

I am just happy as a clam, glad to be back running linux,
and wanted to share this experience.
strace, my friend....

LP