Can't seem to run pbuilder correctly

Subject: Having trouble running pbuilder Brief description of how DigitalOcean can help you: No pbuilder command seems to work aside form ‘pbuilder’ / ‘sudo pbuilder’ (as desktop user). If I invoke ‘pbuilder create’ nothing happens, no output at all, pbuilder doesn’t even kick off to show any errors at all. I tried an strace, but am still trying to parse the output. All these commands work fine on a local Debian 8 VM, as well as a SteamOS test machine.

strace: http://sprunge.us/UdaF

Seems as if anything beyond ‘pbuilder --help’ does not produce any output text on the CLI at all*. From experience, even if you leave out tons of options, and just bark at at pbuilder to do ‘pbuilder create’ it will flash a few lines, even if the directories it needs are not there, basetgz not there, keyring missing, and so on.

Please help DO Community, you’re my only hope (ba dum crash).

-PK