[amelius]

Ok, but then you will still need to parse the output to get the filenames. That's ok, but since it is something that is used a lot, you'd expect a flag.

[tanelpoder]

Check out strace -y and strace -yy (--decode-fds)

[zwp]

You still need to pull out the paths?

A sprinkling of grep/perl (awk/sed/ruby/...) is mostly good enough eg:

strace -e trace=%file cat /etc/passwd 2>&1 >/dev/null | grep ^open | grep -Po '(?<=").*(?=")'

[eesmith]

Is your example situation really all that common?

If so, what format do you expect for the output?

If it's one filename-per-line then how do you encode filenames with embedded newlines?

How do you encode non-UTF8 characters, or is the file meant to be parsed only in binary mode?

I don't know of any generally agreed upon spec for this, so no matter what you think is right, most people are going to have to write a special-purpose parser.

In which case you might as well parse the native strace output since one is about as complex as the other.

[amelius]

It can use the same format as the Unix find utility. This utility has a -print0 flag to separate filenames by NUL characters instead of newlines if desired.

[eesmith]

That is a good point.

I still don't see it as common use case.