Command-Line Options

--debugmsg [channels]

Wine isn't perfect, and many Windows applications still don't run without bugs under Wine (but then, many of them don't run without bugs under native Windows either!). To make it easier for people to track down the causes behind each bug, Wine provides a number of debug channels that you can tap into.

Each debug channel, when activated, will trigger logging messages to be displayed to the console where you invoked wine. From there you can redirect the messages to a file and examine it at your leisure. But be forewarned! Some debug channels can generate incredible volumes of log messages. Among the most prolific offenders are relay which spits out a log message every time a win32 function is called, win which tracks windows message passing, and of course all which is an alias for every single debug channel that exists. For a complex application, your debug logs can easily top 1 MB and higher. A relay trace can often generate more than 10 MB of log messages, depending on how long you run the application. Logging does slow down Wine quite a bit, so don't use --debugmsg unless you really do want log files.

Within each debug channel, you can further specify a message class, to filter out the different severities of errors. The four message classes are: trace, fixme, warn, err.

To turn on a debug channel, use the form class+channel. To turn it off, use class-channel. To list more than one channel in the same --debugmsg option, separate them with commas. For example, to request warn class messages in the heap debug channel, you could invoke wine like this:

$ wine --debugmsg warn+heap program_name
        

If you leave off the message class, wine will display messages from all four classes for that channel:

$ wine --debugmsg +heap program_name
        

If you wanted to see log messages for everything except the relay channel, you might do something like this:

$ wine --debugmsg +all,-relay program_name
        

Here is a master list of all the debug channels and classes in Wine. More channels might be added to (or subtracted from) later versions.

Table 1. Debug Channels

allacceladvapianimateaspi
atomavifile bitblt bitmap caret
cdromclass clipboard clippingcombo
comboex commcommctrlcommdlg console
crtdllcursordatetimedc ddeml
ddraw debug debugstrdelayhlpdialog
dinputdll dosfsdosmemdplay
driverdsoundeditelfdllenhmetafile
eventexecfilefixupfont
gdi globalgraphics headerheap
hookhotkeyicmpiconimagehlp
imagelist immintint10int16
int17int19int21int31 io
ipaddressjoystickkeykeyboardldt
listbox listview localmcimcianim
mciavimcicda mcimidi mciwave mdi
menu message metafilemidi mmaux
mmio mmsys mmtime modulemonthcal
mpr msacm msg msvideo nativefont
nonclient ntdll odbc ole opengl
pager palette pidl print process
profile progressprop propsheetpsapi
psdrv ras rebar reg region
relay resourcericheditscrollsegment
sehselectorsendmsg serversetupapi
setupxshell snoop soundstatic
statusbarstorage stress stringsyscolor
system tabtapetapitask
textthreadthunktimer toolbar
toolhelptooltipstrackbartreeviewttydrv
tweaktypelib updownvervirtual
vxdwavewinwin16drvwin32
wingwininet winsock winspoolwnet
x11 x11drv   

For more details about debug channels, check out the The Wine Developer's Guide.

--dll

--dosver

--help

--managed

--version

--winver