IDG Contributor Network: Probing into your systems with /proc

/proc

It's not just a file system full of odd looking files that only the kernel understands. Instead, it's really something of a peep hole into your system. And there a quite a number of useful things that you can learn from the files that it contains.

So, what do you see when you cd over to /proc? Well, run ls and the first thing you're likely to notice is the very large group of directories with just numbers for names. These numbers correspond to the process IDs (PID) of processes that are running on your system -- everything from the init process that started the boot time ball rolling to the shell you're using right now. And you're likely to see quite a lot of them -- probably several hundred or more.

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