Hi, >From the description you gave (the "ps ax" thing) you want something like "process monitoring tool". The most widely used one is monit [1], in Ruby world another tool called God [2] is quite popular. > This is wisdom. Strace is your tool. strace shows what syscalls are called by a process, it will not tell when the process dies. Despite the fact that ptrace/strace have platform-specific implementations, they might be very useful for a developer. I recommend to read article [3] on this topic. 1] http://mmonit.com/monit/ 2] http://god.rubyforge.org/ 3] http://blog.ksplice.com/2010/08/strace-the-sysadmins-microscope/