Computer Science


PROC(5)             Linux Programmer's Manual             PROC(5)

NAME
       proc - process information pseudo-filesystem

DESCRIPTION
       /proc is a pseudo-filesystem which is used as an interface
       to kernel data structures rather than reading  and  inter-
       preting  /dev/kmem.   Most  of  it  is read-only, but some
       files allow kernel variables to be changed.

       The following outline gives a quick tour through the /proc
       hierarchy.

       [number]
              There is a numerical subdirectory for each running
              process; the subdirectory is named by the process
              ID.  Each contains the following pseudo-files and
              directories.

              cmdline
                     This holds the complete command line for the
                     process, unless the whole process has been
                     swapped out, or unless the process is a
                     zombie.  In either of these later cases,
                     there is nothing in this file: i.e. a read
                     on this file will return as having read 0
                     characters.  This file is null-terminated,
                     but not newline-terminated.

              cwd    This is a link to the current working
                     directory of the process.  To find out the
                     cwd of process 20, for instance, you can do
                     this:
                     cd /proc/20/cwd; /bin/pwd

              Note that the pwd command is often a shell builtin,
              and might not work properly in this context.

              environ
                     This file contains the environment for the
                     process.  The entries are separated by null
                     characters, and there may be a null
                     character at the end.  Thus, to print out
                     the environment of process 1, you would do:
                     (cat /proc/1/environ; echo) | tr "\000" "\n"

              (For a reason why one should want to do this, see
              lilo(8).)

              exe    a pointer to the binary which was executed,
                     and appears as a symbolic link.  readlink(2)
                     on the exe special file returns under Linux
                     2.0 and earlier a string in the format:

                     [device]:inode

                     For example, [0301]:1502 would be inode 1502
                     on device major 03 (IDE, MFM, etc. drives)
                     minor 01 (first partition on the first
                     drive).  Under Linux 2.2 the link contains
                     the actual path name of the command.

                     Also, the symbolic link can be dereferenced
                     normally - attempting to open "exe" will
                     open the executable.  You can even type
                     /proc/[number]/exe to run another copy of
                     the same process as [number].

                     find(1) with the -inum option can be used to
                     locate the file.

              fd     This is a subdirectory containing one entry
                     for each file which the process has open,
                     named by its file descriptor, and which is a
                     symbolic link to the actual file (as the exe
                     entry does).  Thus, 0 is standard input, 1
                     standard output, 2 standard error, etc.

                     Programs that will take a filename, but will
                     not take the standard input, and which write
                     to a file, but will not send their output to
                     standard output, can be effectively foiled
                     this way, assuming that -i is the flag
                     designating an input file and -o is the flag
                     designating an output file:
                     foobar -i /proc/self/fd/0 -o /proc/self/fd/1 ...
                     and you have a working filter.  Note that
                     this will not work for programs that seek on
                     their files, as the files in the fd
                     directory are not seekable.

                     /proc/self/fd/N is approximately the same as
                     /dev/fd/N in some UNIX and UNIX-like
                     systems.  Most Linux MAKEDEV scripts
                     symbolically link /dev/fd to
                     [..]/proc/self/fd, in fact.

              maps   A file containing the currently mapped
                     memory regions and their access permissions.

                     The format is:
                        address           perms offset   dev   inode
                        00000000-0002f000 r-x-- 00000400 03:03 1401
                        0002f000-00032000 rwx-p 0002f400 03:03 1401
                        00032000-0005b000 rwx-p 00000000 00:00 0
                        60000000-60098000 rwx-p 00000400 03:03 215
                        60098000-600c7000 rwx-p 00000000 00:00 0
                        bfffa000-c0000000 rwx-p 00000000 00:00 0

              where address is the address space in the process
              that it occupies, perms is a set of permissions:
                   r = read
                   w = write
                   x = execute
                   s = shared
                   p = private (copy on write)

              offset is the offset into the file/whatever, dev is
              the device (major:minor), and inode is the inode on
              that device.  0 indicates that no inode is
              associated with the memory region, as the case
              would be with bss.

              Under Linux 2.2 there is an additional field giving
              a pathname where applicable.

              mem    This is not the same as the mem (1:1)
                     device, despite the fact that it has the
                     same device numbers.  The /dev/mem device is
                     the physical memory before any address
                     translation is done, but the mem file here
                     is the memory of the process that accesses
                     it.  This cannot be mmap(2)'ed currently,
                     and will not be until a general mmap(2) is
                     added to the kernel.  (This might have
                     happened by the time you read this.)

              mmap   Directory of maps by mmap(2) which are
                     symbolic links like exe, fd/*, etc.  Note
                     that maps includes a superset of this
                     information, so /proc/*/mmap should be
                     considered obsolete.

                     "0" is usually libc.so.4.

                     /proc/*/mmap was removed in Linux kernel
                     version 1.1.40.  (It really was obsolete!)

              root   Unix and linux support the idea of a per-
                     process root of the filesystem, set by the
                     chroot(2) system call.  Root points to the
                     file system root, and behaves as exe, fd/*,
                     etc. do.

              stat   Status information about the process.  This
                     is used by ps(1).

                     The fields, in order, with their proper
                     scanf(3) format specifiers, are:

                      pid %d The process id.

                      comm %s
                             The filename of the executable, in
                             parentheses.  This is visible
                             whether or not the executable is
                             swapped out.

                      state %c
                             One character from the string
                             "RSDZT" where R is running, S is
                             sleeping in an interruptible wait, D
                             is sleeping in an uninterruptible
                             wait or swapping, Z is zombie, and T
                             is traced or stopped (on a signal).

                      ppid %d
                             The PID of the parent.

                      pgrp %d
                             The process group ID of the process.

                      session %d
                             The session ID of the process.

                      tty %d The tty the process uses.

                      tpgid %d
                             The process group ID of the process
                             which currently owns the tty that
                             the process is connected to.

                      flags %u
                             The flags of the process.
                             Currently, every flag has the math
                             bit set, because crt0.s checks for
                             math emulation, so this is not
                             included in the output.  This is
                             probably a bug, as not every process
                             is a compiled C program.  The math
                             bit should be a decimal 4, and the
                             traced bit is decimal 10.

                      minflt %u
                             The number of minor faults the
                             process has made, those which have
                             not required loading a memory page
                             from disk.

                      cminflt %u
                             The number of minor faults that the
                             process and its children have made.

                      majflt %u
                             The number of major faults the
                             process has made, those which have
                             required loading a memory page from
                             disk.

                      cmajflt %u
                             The number of major faults that the
                             process and its children have made.

                      utime %d
                             The number of jiffies that this
                             process has been scheduled in user
                             mode.

                      stime %d
                             The number of jiffies that this
                             process has been scheduled in kernel
                             mode.

                      cutime %d
                             The number of jiffies that this
                             process and its children have been
                             scheduled in user mode.

                      cstime %d
                             The number of jiffies that this
                             process and its children have been
                             scheduled in kernel mode.

                      counter %d
                             The current maximum size in jiffies
                             of the process's next timeslice, or
                             what is currently left of its
                             current timeslice, if it is the
                             currently running process.

                      priority %d
                             The standard nice value, plus
                             fifteen.  The value is never
                             negative in the kernel.

                      timeout %u
                             The time in jiffies of the process's
                             next timeout.

                      itrealvalue %u
                             The time (in jiffies) before the
                             next SIGALRM is sent to the process
                             due to an interval timer.

                      starttime %d Time the process started in
                             jiffies after system
                             boot.

                      vsize %u
                             Virtual memory size

                      rss %u Resident Set Size: number of pages
                             the process has in real memory,
                             minus 3 for administrative purposes.
                             This is just the pages which count
                             towards text, data, or stack space.
                             This does not include pages which
                             have not been demand-loaded in, or
                             which are swapped out.

                      rlim %u
                             Current limit in bytes on the rss of
                             the process (usually 2,147,483,647).

                      startcode %u
                             The address above which program text
                             can run.

                      endcode %u
                             The address below which program text
                             can run.

                      startstack %u
                             The address of the start of the
                             stack.

                      kstkesp %u
                             The current value of esp (32-bit
                             stack pointer), as found in the
                             kernel stack page for the process.

                      kstkeip %u
                             The current EIP (32-bit instruction
                             pointer).

                      signal %d
                             The bitmap of pending signals
                             (usually 0).

                      blocked %d
                             The bitmap of blocked signals
                             (usually 0, 2 for shells).

                      sigignore %d
                             The bitmap of ignored signals.

                      sigcatch %d
                             The bitmap of catched signals.

                      wchan %u
                             This is the "channel" in which the
                             process is waiting.  This is the
                             address of a system call, and can be
                             looked up in a namelist if you need
                             a textual name.  (If you have an up-
                             to-date /etc/psdatabase, then try ps
                             -l to see the WCHAN field in action)

       cpuinfo
              This is a collection of CPU and system architecture
              dependent items, for each supported architecture a
              different list.  The only two common entries are
              cpu which is (guess what) the CPU currently in use
              and BogoMIPS a system constant which is calculated
              during kernel initialization.

       devices
              Text listing of major numbers and device groups.
              This can be used by MAKEDEV scripts for consistency
              with the kernel.

       dma    This is a list of the registered ISA DMA (direct
              memory access) channels in use.

       filesystems
              A text listing of the filesystems which were
              compiled into the kernel.  Incidentally, this is
              used by mount(1) to cycle through different
              filesystems when none is specified.

       interrupts
              This is used to record the number of interrupts per
              each IRQ on (at least) the i386 architechure.  Very
              easy to read formatting, done in ASCII.

       ioports
              This is a list of currently registered Input-Output
              port regions that are in use.

       kcore  This file represents the physical memory of the
              system and is stored in the core file format.  With
              this pseudo-file, and an unstripped kernel
              (/usr/src/linux/tools/zSystem) binary, GDB can be
              used to examine the current state of any kernel
              data structures.

              The total length of the file is the size of
              physical memory (RAM) plus 4KB.

       kmsg   This file can be used instead of the syslog(2)
              system call to log kernel messages.  A process must
              have superuser privileges to read this file, and
              only one process should read this file.  This file
              should not be read if a syslog process is running
              which uses the syslog(2) system call facility to
              log kernel messages.

              Information in this file is retrieved with the
              dmesg(8) program).

       ksyms  This holds the kernel exported symbol definitions
              used by the modules(X) tools to dynamically link
              and bind loadable modules.

       loadavg
              The load average numbers give the number of jobs in
              the run queue averaged over 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
              They are the same as the load average numbers given
              by uptime(1) and other programs.

       malloc This file is only present if CONFIGDEBUGMALLOC was
              defined during compilation.

       meminfo
              This is used by free(1) to report the amount of
              free and used memory (both physical and swap) on
              the system as well as the shared memory and buffers
              used by the kernel.

              It is in the same format as free(1), except in
              bytes rather than KB.

       modules
              A text list of the modules that have been loaded by
              the system.

       net    various net pseudo-files, all of which give the
              status of some part of the networking layer.  These
              files contain ASCII structures, and are therefore
              readable with cat.  However, the standard
              netstat(8) suite provides much cleaner access to
              these files.

              arp    This holds an ASCII readable dump of the
                     kernel ARP table used for address
                     resolutions. It will show both dynamically
                     learned and pre-programmed ARP entries.  The
                     format is:
                   IP address       HW type     Flags       HW address
                   10.11.100.129    0x1         0x6         00:20:8A:00:0C:5A
                   10.11.100.5      0x1         0x2         00:C0:EA:00:00:4E
                   44.131.10.6      0x3         0x2         GW4PTS

              Where 'IP address' is the IPv4 address of the
              machine, the 'HW type' is the hardware type of the
              address from RFC 826. The flags are the internal
              flags of the ARP structure (as defined in
              /usr/include/linux/if_arp.h) and the 'HW address'
              is the physical layer mapping for that IP address
              if it is known.

              dev    The dev pseudo-file contains network device
                     status information. This gives the number of
                     received and sent packets, the number of
                     errors and collisions and other basic
                     statistics. These are used by the
                     ifconfig(8) program to report device status.
                     The format is:
        Inter-|   Receive                  |   Transmit
         face |packets errs drop fifo frame|packets errs drop fifo colls carrier
            lo:      0    0    0    0    0     2353    0    0    0     0    0
          eth0: 644324    1    0    0    1   563770    0    0    0   581    0

              ipx    No information.

              ipx_route
                     No information.

              rarp   This file uses the same format as the arp
                     file and contains the current reverse
                     mapping database used to provide rarp(8)
                     reverse address lookup services. If RARP is
                     not configured into the kernel this file
                     will not be present.

              raw    Holds a dump of the RAW socket table. Much
                     of the information is not of use apart from
                     debugging. The 'sl' value is the kernel hash
                     slot for the socket, the 'local address' is
                     the local address and protocol number
                     pair."St" is the internal status of the
                     socket. The "tx_queue" and "rx_queue" are
                     the outgoing and incoming data queue in
                     terms of kernel memory usage. The "tr",
                     "tm->when" and "rexmits" fields are not used
                     by RAW. The uid field holds the creator euid
                     of the socket.

              route  No information, but looks similar to
                     route(8)

              snmp   This file holds the ASCII data needed for
                     the IP, ICMP, TCP and UDP management
                     information bases for an snmp agent. As of
                     writing the TCP mib is incomplete. It is
                     hoped to have it completed by 1.2.0.

              tcp    Holds a dump of the TCP socket table. Much
                     of the information is not of use apart from
                     debugging. The "sl" value is the kernel hash
                     slot for the socket, the "local address" is
                     the local address and port number pair. The
                     "remote address" is the remote address and
                     port number pair (if connected). 'St' is the
                     internal status of the socket. The
                     'tx_queue' and 'rx_queue' are the outgoing
                     and incoming data queue in terms of kernel
                     memory usage. The "tr", "tm->when" and
                     "rexmits" fields hold internal information
                     of the kernel socket state and are only
                     useful for debugging. The uid field holds
                     the creator euid of the socket.

              udp    Holds a dump of the UDP socket table. Much
                     of the information is not of use apart from
                     debugging. The "sl" value is the kernel hash
                     slot for the socket, the "local address" is
                     the local address and port number pair. The
                     "remote address" is the remote address and
                     port number pair (if connected). "St" is the
                     internal status of the socket. The
                     "tx_queue" and "rx_queue" are the outgoing
                     and incoming data queue in terms of kernel
                     memory usage. The "tr", "tm->when" and
                     "rexmits" fields are not used by UDP. The
                     uid field holds the creator euid of the
                     socket.  The format is:
sl  local_address rem_address   st tx_queue rx_queue tr rexmits  tm->when uid
 1: 01642C89:0201 0C642C89:03FF 01 00000000:00000001 01:000071BA 00000000 0
 1: 00000000:0801 00000000:0000 0A 00000000:00000000 00:00000000 6F000100 0
 1: 00000000:0201 00000000:0000 0A 00000000:00000000 00:00000000 00000000 0

              unix   Lists the UNIX domain sockets present within
                     the system and their status.  The format is:
                     Num RefCount Protocol Flags    Type St Path
                      0: 00000002 00000000 00000000 0001 03
                      1: 00000001 00000000 00010000 0001 01 /dev/printer

              Where 'Num' is the kernel table slot number,
              'RefCount' is the number of users of the socket,
              'Protocol' is currently always 0, 'Flags' represent
              the internal kernel flags holding the status of the
              socket. Type is always '1' currently (Unix domain
              datagram sockets are not yet supported in the
              kernel). 'St' is the internal state of the socket
              and Path is the bound path (if any) of the socket.

       pci    This is a listing of all PCI devices found during
              kernel initialization and their configuration.

       scsi   A directory with the scsi midlevel pseudo-file and
              various SCSI lowlevel driver directories, which
              contain a file for each SCSI host in this system,
              all of which give the status of some part of the
              SCSI IO subsystem.  These files contain ASCII
              structures, and are therefore readable with cat.

              You can also write to some of the files to
              reconfigure the subsystem or switch certain
              features on or off.

              scsi   This is a listing of all SCSI devices known
                     to the kernel. The listing is similar to the
                     one seen during bootup.  scsi currently
                     supports only the singledevice command which
                     allows root to add a hotplugged device to
                     the list of known devices.

                     An echo 'scsi singledevice 1 0 5 0' >
                     /proc/scsi/scsi will cause host scsi1 to
                     scan on SCSI channel 0 for a device on ID 5
                     LUN 0. If there is already a device known on
                     this address or the address is invalid an
                     error will be returned.

              drivername
                     drivername can currently be: NCR53c7xx,
                     aha152x, aha1542, aha1740, aic7xxx,
                     buslogic, eata_dma, eata_pio, fdomain,
                     in2000, pas16, qlogic, scsi_debug, seagate,
                     t128, u15-24f, ultrastore or wd7000.  These
                     directories show up for all drivers which
                     registered at least one SCSI HBA. Every
                     directory contains one file per registered
                     host. Every host-file is named after the
                     number the host got assigned during
                     initilization.

                     Reading these files will usually show driver
                     and host configuration, statistics etc.

                     Writing to these files allows different
                     things on different hosts. For example with
                     the latency and nolatency commands root can
                     switch on and off command latency
                     measurement code in the eata_dma driver.
                     With the lockup and unlock commands root can
                     control bus lockups simulated by the
                     scsi_debug driver.

       self   This directory refers to the process accessing the
              /proc filesystem, and is identical to the /proc
              directory named by the process ID of the same
              process.

       stat   kernel/system statistics

              cpu  3357 0 4313 1362393
                     The number of jiffies (1/100ths of a second)
                     that the system spent in user mode, user
                     mode with low priority (nice), system mode,
                     and the idle task, respectively.  The last
                     value should be 100 times the second entry
                     in the uptime pseudo-file.

              disk 0 0 0 0
                     The four disk entries are not implemented at
                     this time.  I'm not even sure what this
                     should be, since kernel statistics on other
                     machines usually track both transfer rate
                     and I/Os per second and this only allows for
                     one field per drive.

              page 5741 1808
                     The number of pages the system paged in and
                     the number that were paged out (from disk).

              swap 1 0
                     The number of swap pages that have been
                     brought in and out.

              intr 1462898
                     The number of interrupts received from the
                     system boot.

              ctxt 115315
                     The number of context switches that the
                     system underwent.

              btime 769041601
                     boot time, in seconds since the epoch
                     (January 1, 1970).

       sys    This directory (present since 1.3.57) contains a
              number of files and subdirectories corresponding to
              kernel variables.  These variables can be read and
              sometimes modified using the proc file system, and
              using the sysctl(2) system call. Presently, there
              are subdirectories kernel, net, vm that each
              contain more files and subdirectories.

              kernel This contains files domainname, file-max,
                     file-nr, hostname, inode-max, inode-nr,
                     osrelease, ostype, panic, real-root-dev,
                     securelevel, version, with function fairly
                     clear from the name.

              The (read-only) file file-nr gives the number of
              files presently opened.

              The file file-max gives the maximum number of open
              files the kernel is willing to handle. If 1024 is
              not enough for you, try
              echo 4096 > /proc/sys/kernel/file-max

              Similarly, the files inode-nr and inode-max
              indicate the present and the maximum number of
              inodes.

              The files ostype, osrelease, version give
              substrings of /proc/version.

              The file panic gives r/w access to the kernel
              variable panic_timeout.  If this is zero, the
              kernel will loop on a panic; if nonzero it
              indicates that the kernel should autoreboot after
              this number of seconds.

              The file securelevel seems rather meaningless at
              present - root is just too powerful.

       uptime This file contains two numbers: the uptime of the
              system (seconds), and the amount of time spent in
              idle process (seconds).

       version
              This strings identifies the kernel version that is
              currently running.  For instance:
            Linux version 1.0.9 (quinlan@phaze) #1 Sat May 14 01:51:54 EDT 1994

SEE ALSO
       cat(1), find(1), free(1), mount(1), ps(1), tr(1),
       uptime(1), readlink(2), mmap(2), chroot(2), syslog(2),
       hier(7), arp(8), dmesg(8), netstat(8), route(8),
       ifconfig(8), procinfo(8) and much more

CONFORMS TO
       This roughly conforms to a Linux 1.3.11 kernel.  Please
       update this as necessary!

       Last updated for Linux 1.3.11.

CAVEATS
       Note that many strings (i.e., the environment and command
       line) are in the internal format, with sub-fields
       terminated by NUL bytes, so you may find that things are
       more readable if you use od -c or tr "\000" "\n" to read
       them.

       This manual page is incomplete, possibly inaccurate, and
       is the kind of thing that needs to be updated very often.

BUGS
       The /proc file system may introduce security holes into
       processes running with chroot(2).  For example, if /proc
       is mounted in the chroot hierarchy, a chdir(2) to
       /proc/1/root will return to the original root of the file
       system.  This may be considered a feature instead of a
       bug, since Linux does not yet support the fchroot(2) call.

                           22 July 1996                         1

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