How can I monitor the output of an already running program?

Question

I am trying to figure out what is going on with pulseaudio on my computer because almost every 20 seconds of listening to a song it freezes.

I've tried killall pulseaudio && pulseaudio to try to get the output of pulseaudio for when it crashes but for some reasons it gives me an error. Oddly something to do with ALSA

E: module-alsa-card.c: Failed to find a working profile.
E: module.c: Failed to load  module "module-alsa-card" (argument: "device_id="1" name="1" card_name="alsa_card.1" tsched=yes ignore_dB=no card_properties="module-udev-detect.discovered=1""): initialization failed.

I am not really sure if this is the problem, but if it is, I would still like to know for future reference how I could monitor the output of a program which has not been manually called through the terminal.

Answer 1

The usual way to read application's outputs is running them from terminal. Some programs have a --quiet option to reduce output, some have an additional --verbous option to view as much as possible (that depends on the code). Still, some programs write a log file to see what happened.

This is all very different from software to software. Thus a general answer to your question cannot be given.

For PulseAudio there is a wiki on how to log output.