[SOLVED] How to use ltrace with wildcards

How to use ltrace with wildcards

I'm new to ltrace.

I'd like to use wildcards (patterns) to trace function calls, but they don't seem to work as they should, based on the web pages I see, e.g. http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/ltrace.1.html

E.g. this works:

ltrace -c -e "XDrawLine" -p 10876 ^C
% time     seconds  usecs/call     calls      function
------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------------------
100.00    4.925592         501      9829 XDrawLine
------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------------------
100.00    4.925592                  9829 total

But this matches nothing:

trace -c -e "XDrawLin*" -p 10876
^C
% time     seconds  usecs/call     calls      function
------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------------------
------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------------------
100.00    0.000000                     0 total

Also, no luck with -e "/XDrawLin.*/" or -e "XDrawLin.*" either. Any working example is appreciated.

If this is sorted out, I'd like to move on to how to trace on C++ lib symbols, shall I use mangled or demangled format ?

Solution

The functionality of the -e switch evolved over ltrace releases. Even fairly recent Linux releases frequently shipped an older ltrace, and that’s most likely is the issue for you. (For example, RHEL6 if I remember correctly, ships with version 0.5.) Run ltrace --v and make sure you have version 0.7 and above.

* Version 0.7.0 [2012-11-09 Fri]

** Tracing
...

*** Limited support for tracing returns from tail call functions

*** -e, -x and -l selectors now allow using globs and regular expressions

http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ltrace.git;a=blob_plain;f=NEWS;hb=0.7.3

If you have an older ltrace - update it with your package manager or download it from http://freecode.com/projects/ltrace