Which platform are you on? The strace I was referring to is a Linux tool — on some other unixes, the program named strace is an entirely different tool...

[ Update: actually, that's exactly the error message you get when you try to run strace (STREAMS trace) on Solaris as a regular user (because the device that /dev/log points to is owned by root:sys). On HP-UX and AIX I'm getting different error messages — but YMMV.  So I supppose what you want is truss (usage for simple things is essentially the same as strace under Linux). ]

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a list of corresponding tools for other platforms... (if the respective tool you want is not installed already, you should be able to download it from the net).

(BTW, you called it correctly.)