info in /proc directory

One of the most interesting directories on any Linux system is /proc, a virtual filesystem that provides a plethora of information on the hardware of the running system, and of the various processes running. In fact, many programs such as ps and top obtain their information by mining /proc.

Some well-known virtual files in /proc include /proc/cpuinfo, which prints out information on the running CPU(s); /proc/meminfo, which prints out information on installed memory; and /proc/cmdline, which provides the arguments to the Linux kernel at boot.

Other lesser-known files in /proc include:

• /proc/apm, which provides information related to Advanced Power Management, if installed
• /proc/loadavg shows the system load average
• /proc/filesystems shows the available filesystem support in the kernel and whether or not they are in use on a block device
• /proc/mounts will show what mounts are currently active, what block device they belong to, where they are mounted, and what options were used to mount them
• /proc/net directory contains more files, all related to network information

Most of these files look like text files so can be looked at using the cat utility, such as:

# cat /proc/cpuinfo

processor       : 0

vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD

cpu family      : 15

model           : 47

model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+

stepping        : 2

cpu MHz         : 2202.909

...

Further, if you look inside /proc, you will notice quite a few numbered directories. These numbers correspond to running processes. Inside each directory are a number of files that give information regarding the process. For instance, /proc/1/ would contain information on process #1, which is typically init.

Some files in this directory are symlinks; the /proc/1/cwd symlink points to /, which indicates that init’s current working directory is /, the root directory. The /proc/1/exe symlink points to /sbin/init, the program that is running. The /proc/1/cmdline is a file containing the command-line used to execute the program. The /proc/1/status file indicates the status of the program, which can be used to determine if a program is sleeping or a zombie process, the amount of memory it’s using, the number of threads, the user/group privileges it is running as, and more.

To determine what files are in use by a process, look in the /proc/[pid]/fd/ directory. Each link in the directory will point to a file that is in use by the process in question.

There is a lot of information in /proc that can be found by those willing to look. A number of front-ends exist to help parse the information — tools like ps, top, and free, among many others provide more human-readable information, but to really find out what a program is doing, the authoritative resource is the /proc directory.

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