Brendan, I appreciate all your contributions to the software tool landscape.

> It's another to write a post that's dangerous.

Huh? It's called "introduction to strace". I agree with everything you said, it's easy to bork things up with strace. But I'd hardly call this article "dangerous."

90% of the time I'm running some script or opaque binary which gives some bogus unclear error or just stops executing (or appears to halt). strace is the perfect tool for finding out which syscall is failing and why.

But, yes, your warnings are good reminders that attaching to a service that's already running can have bad consequences.