Are you perhaps thinking of strace?  It prints out all of the system
calls being used.

On Thu, 2005-09-08 at 21:39 -0500, John Reese wrote:
> Years ago I saw a utility that printed out commands issued during GUI
> events. For example, starting Evolution in the GUI environment resulted
> in a flurry of commands registered in the shell. Very handy.
> 
> Now I am switching window managers and am having trouble managing the
> behavior of some applications.
> 
> Does anybody know/remember a utility of this nature?
> 
> John Reese
> 
> 
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