Fixing problems with a black box application, strace

If you don't know about this command you should:

strace  - trace system calls and signals

You can see which files a specific program touches and a lot, lot more.

Here is a blog that goes into more than sufficient detail about the topic:
http://chadfowler.com/blog/2014/01/26/the-magic-of-strace/

I was trying to get Crayon Physics to work on a Linux box and the error messages were less than helpful, but I was able to make forward progress thanks to this program.