cheese failing silently

[Matt Graham]

From: Dazed_75 <lthielster at gmail.com>
[cheese snippage]
>> Thanks for the info Ted!  Sorry I misunderstod. 
> So, back to the drawing board.  Lordy I do hate silent failures.
> Unfortunately, it is all too common to not convey any useful
> information to the poor user!

strace and strace -ff can be your friends if the process that's
failing silently is dying because of a missing file, or a file that's
not where it's supposed to be.  "strace process > file.log 2>&1",
then after process fails, start at the end of file.log and go up,
looking for suspicious problems.  I've used this technique to find
and diagnose all sorts of "program barfs, but no errors reported"
problems in the past.

The main problem is that this approach won't help much with programs
that communicate with other programs over sockets.  Then you'd need
to strace all the processes involved and a decent knowledge of the
protocol that's being used to communicate.

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see