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/

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 '(?<=").*(?=")'