How to find the reason for a dead process without log file on unix?

Question

This is an interview question.

A developer started a process. But when a customer wants to use the process, he found the process wasn\'t running. The developer logged

Answer 1

If you have the disk space and spare CPU power, you can leave strace following the program to catch the sequence leading up to exit.

One possible cause if the program died without leaving any trace is the Out-Of-Memory (OOM) killer. This will leave a message in the kernel log if it kills your process.

From the same answer, process accounting can be modified to provide some clues by telling you the exit code along with the exit time.