I've been playing around with the strace program some more and noticed a minor glitch: it's only meant to trace forked children if the -f flag is given on the command line. Unfortunately it currently always traces children, and the this flag has no effect.
Having read the MS documentation, I fully understand this: the documentation of the relevant flag (DEBUG_ONLY_THIS_PROCESS) is at the least utterly ambiguous and most likely contradictory. Anyhow, the upshot is that the DEBUG_PROCESS flag should be given to CreateProcess() only if children are to be debugged; otherwise the DEBUG_ONLY_THIS_PROCESS flag should be given. This isn't the scheme in utils/strace.cc, so I've appended a tiny patch. As it's a trivial patch and my assignment form has probably yet to reach RedHat, please make what use you can of it. // Conrad diff -u -u -r1.20 strace.cc --- strace.cc 27 May 2002 01:49:08 -0000 1.20 +++ strace.cc 1 Jun 2002 21:39:39 -0000 @@ -314,8 +314,8 @@ /* cygwin32_conv_to_win32_path (exec_file, real_path); */ - flags = forkdebug ? 0 : DEBUG_ONLY_THIS_PROCESS; - flags |= CREATE_DEFAULT_ERROR_MODE | DEBUG_PROCESS; + flags = forkdebug ? DEBUG_PROCESS : DEBUG_ONLY_THIS_PROCESS; + flags |= CREATE_DEFAULT_ERROR_MODE; flags |= (new_window ? CREATE_NEW_CONSOLE | CREATE_NEW_PROCESS_GROUP : 0); make_command_line (one_line, argv);