Question

“strace wget grooveshark.com” stops with strange socket calls with wrong string length and I have to Ctrl+C to terminate.

write(2, "Connecting to grooveshark.com (g"..., 67Connecting to grooveshark.com (grooveshark.com)|8.20.213.76|:80... ) = 67
socket(PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_IP) = 3
connect(3, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(80), sin_addr=inet_addr("8.20.213.76")}, 16) = 0
write(2, "connected.\n", 11connected.
)            = 11
select(4, NULL, [3], NULL, {900, 0})    = 1 (out [3], left {899, 999993})
write(3, "GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nUser-Agent: Wget"..., 115) = 115
write(2, "HTTP request sent, awaiting resp"..., 40HTTP request sent, awaiting response... ) = 40 [[ Check this line ]]
select(4, [3], NULL, NULL, {900, 0} ^C 

write(2, “HTTP request sent, awaiting resp”…, 40HTTP request sent, awaiting response… ) = 40

should be

write(2, “HTTP request sent, awaiting response…”, 40 ) = 40

but strace wget google.com gives

write(3, "GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nUser-Agent: Wget"..., 116) = 116
write(2, "HTTP request sent, awaiting resp"..., 40) = 40
select(4, [3], NULL, NULL, {900, 0})    = 1 (in [3], left {899, 932611})

and properly terminates.

Thanks

Answer 1

You are seeing the output of wget mixed with the output of strace. Use the -o option of strace to store the trace in a file so that this won’t happen.

write(2, “HTTP request sent, awaiting resp”…, 40HTTP request sent, awaiting response… ) = 40

This write call in wget prints the message to stderr, and before it returns, its output is seen in the terminal, between 40 and the closing parenthesis