How do I track what programs are being accessed and called?

[aceO07]

This is related to my ghostscript thread, but hopefully more general.

I want to see what programs/files are being accessed when I get ghostscript to run successfully on my Ubuntu system. I figure if I can see what's being used during my convert process, I can check to see if it exists on the OpenSuse system, which is failing at a ghostscript convert.

For example, if I run 'convert new.eps new.png', I want to see:
convert new.eps new.png
gs blah blah blah new.eps size size x y new.png etc
other programs
other programs...
...

 

[cmv]

Usually, you can enable a debugging option with varying levels of verbosity that will dump those kinds of details as a command line option. Failing that, you could try "losf" (the -n option dramatically speeds it up), SystemTap, strace, and poking around in the process details in /proc. If this is a slow operation (which I suspect it is not), lsof/proc will work. Otherwise, you'll need something like SystemTap or strace.

The strace option is probably the first to try after lsof/proc.