Get the Environment of a Process

Another useful trick is to list the set of environment variables and their values. Files of the form /proc/[pid]/environ contain the initial environment that was set up when the process with PID [pid] was started. Caveat: It is a snapshot, so if the process changes some of the environment variables later using the putenv (C) or os.putenv (Python) library functions or equivalent, those changes will not be reflected in the file's contents. The entries are of the form var=value and are terminated by null bytes (\0). So, to print out the environment of process 1234, you could enter

$ strings /proc/1234/environ

where strings is a Linux command that prints only the strings of printable characters in any file (including binary files); for example:

# strings /proc/$$/environ
TERM=xterm
MAIL=/var/mail/root
HOME=/root
SHELL=/bin/bash
USER=root
LOGNAME=root
(some lines of output deleted)

(See man strings on your local Linux system for more on the strings command.) The get_proc_environ.py script in Listing 5 gets the environment of a process and is similar to get_proc_cmdline.py. The format of the data they both retrieve is the same (both use null-terminated strings), the overall program structure is the same, and the output and error messages are similar. The script refers to proc_info.py (Listing 2), as well as read_proc_environ.py (Listing 6).

01 # A program to get the environments of processes, given their PIDs.
02
03 from __future__ import print_function
04 import sys
05 from proc_info import read_proc_environ
06
07 from error_exit import error_exit
08
09 def main():
10     if len(sys.argv) < 2:
11         error_exit("{}: Error: Need at least one PID to process.\n".format(sys.argv[0]))
12     pids = sys.argv[1:]
13     print("Getting environment for these PIDs:\n{}".format(' '.join(pids)))
14     for pid in pids:
15         proc_filename = "/proc/{}/environ".format(pid)
16         ok, result = read_proc_environ(proc_filename)
17         if ok:
18             sys.stdout.write("PID: {}\nEnvironment:\n{}".format(pid, result))
19         else:
20             sys.stderr.write("PID: {} Error: {}\n".format(pid, result))
21
22 if __name__ == '__main__':
23     main()

01 function
02 import sys
03
04 pid = sys.argv[1]
05 print("Trying to get environment for process with PID:", pid)
06
07 try:
08     #print(open('/proc/{}/cmdline'.format(pid), 'r').read().replace('\0', ' '))
09     filename = '/proc/{}/environ'.format(pid)
10     fil = open(filename, 'r')
11     env_with_nulls = fil.read()
12     env_with_newlines = env_with_nulls.replace('\0', '\n')
13     print("Process with PID: {} has command-line:\n{}".format(pid, env_with_newlines))
14 except IOError as ioe:
15     sys.stderr.write("Caught IOError while opening file {}:\n{}\n".format(filename, str(ioe)))
16 except Exception as e:
17     sys.stderr.write("Caught Exception: {}".format(str(e)))

To get the environment of a process, run the get_proc_environ.py script:

$ python get_proc_environ.py $$
Getting environment for these PIDs:
3807
PID: 3807
Environment:
USER=vram
HOME=/home/vram
MAIL=/var/mail/vram
SHELL=/bin/bash
TERM=xterm
(some lines of output deleted)

Note that the command uses $$ to represent the PID of the current shell instance.

If you try to get the environment for the init process (PID 1) or other processes that require superuser access, you'll need to use su:

$ su
Password:
# python get_proc_environ.py 1
Getting environment for these PIDs:
1
PID: 1
Environment:
HOME=/
TERM=linux
PATH=/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin
PWD=/
(some lines of output deleted)

Getting the Process Status

Files of the form /proc/[pid]/status describe the status of the running process. The Linux ps command itself uses this file to get process status information.

The status of a process contains some of the same information provided with the ps command, but in this case, you are getting it programmatically, and you also get other information, such as the username of the user in whose name the process is running.

The /proc/[pid]/status file for a process contains many field_name: field_value pairs. Each pair gives information about some aspect of the process.

The following are a few useful pieces of status data:

• the process name (the Name: line)
• the process ID (Pid:)
• the parent process ID (PPid:)
• the process user ID (Uid:)
• the process group ID (Gid:)
• the process user name (this field is not in the status information; I get it from the /etc/passwd file using the user ID as the key)

The awk script that fetches the status data is shown in Listing 7. The script gets the required fields and their values from any file of the form /proc/[pid]/status, with the file name given as a command-line argument.

01 # proc_status.awk
02 FILENAME != OLDFILENAME {print ""; OLDFILENAME = FILENAME}
03 /^Name:/ {print "Name:", $2}
04 /^State:/ {print "State:", $2}
05 /^Pid:/ {print "Pid:", $2}
06 /^PPid:/ {print "PPid:", $2}
07 /^Uid:/ {print "Uid:", $2}
08 /^Gid:/ {print "Gid:", $2}

The first line in Listing 7 prints a blank line as a separator whenever the input file name changes. FILENAME is a built-in awk variable representing the current input file name. OLDFILENAME is a variable defined by me. Because OLDFILENAME is compared with FILENAME, which is a string variable, OLDFILENAME is also treated as a string variable.

String variables are initialized by default to an empty string (""), so from the result of the evaluation of the pattern, that first script line prints a blank line in all cases, whether you have one input file name or many. (print "" prints an empty line.) Also, each time the input file name changes, that first line updates OLDFILENAME to be equal to the new value of FILENAME.

I use the status field names as patterns inside slash characters, and the corresponding actions in braces are run for each line in the input (to be shown) where the pattern matches the line. The caret (^) at the start of each pattern tells awk to anchor the pattern to the beginning of the line.

The patterns match the desired lines from the input, and the second field ($2) of each line is printed with an appropriate text label before it.

To get the status information for the current process, the line

$ awk -f proc_status.awk /proc/$$/status

outputs:

Name: bash
 State: S
 Pid: 2123
 PPid: 2122
 Uid: 1002
 Gid: 1004

The State field in the output shows the current state of the process. It can have one of the following values: R (running), S (sleeping), D (disk sleep), T (stopped), t(tracing stop), Z (zombie), or X (dead).

The -f option of awk says to read the script (to be run) from the file name that follows the option. The next argument to awk is the file name from which to get the input. In this case, it is the procfs pseudo-file that holds the status information from the current process ($$).

Adding the username in the output is slightly complex (Listing 8).

01 # proc_status_with_username.awk
02 FILENAME != OLDFILENAME { print ""; OLDFILENAME = FILENAME }
03 /^Name:/ { print "Name:", $2 }
04 /^State:/ { print "State:", $2 }
05 /^Pid:/ { print "Pid:", $2 }
06 /^PPid:/ { print "PPid:", $2 }
07 /^Uid:/ {
08     print "Uid:", $2;
09     uid=$2;
10     printf "Username: "
11     system("awk -F: ' $3 == '"uid"' { print $1; exit } ' /etc/passwd")
12 }
13 /^Gid:/ { print "Gid:", $2 }

The main change between Listing 7 and Listing 8 is the change to the line with the pattern ^Uid:; instead of printing just "Uid:", $2, it has a block of four statements between braces (lines 7-12). Those statements are executed instead of the previous single statement whenever the pattern matches.

Awk's -F: option (line 11) sets the input field delimiter to a different value from the default – here a colon, because that is the delimiter used in the password file.

Those four statements between the braces (in Listing 8) do the following, with the last statement performing a bit of shell quoting magic:

• print the text Uid: and $2, the second field (the user ID);
• set variable uid equal to $2;
• print the text Username: (with a space after) without a newline; hence, the printf, not print, because printf does not add a newline unless asked to);
• use the awk built-in function system to run another instance of awk as a child process; that instance has a pattern that tries to match the third field of the current line of input (the user ID) from the password file with the value of variable uid, and if it matches, it prints the first field of that line (the user name) and then exits.

The end result, therefore, is a call to an inner awk script in the middle of the outer awk script, which fetches the user name and inserts it into the middle of the outer script's output.

Because awk supports multiple file name arguments (as any well-written Linux filter should), you can run the script in Listing 8 with more than one file name.

Figure 2 shows how to get the status of processes using awk.

Figure 2: Getting the status of processes using awk.

You can also get the status output using a Python program. See the get_proc_status.py program with the listings for this article at the Linux Magazine website [4].

Conclusion

In this article, I described how to get useful information from the Linux /proc filesystem using shell commands, Python scripts, and awk. A couple of ideas for further exploration of procfs are:

• Use the files named /proc/[pid]/io to get information about I/O being performed by a process (e.g., the progress of a file tree copy).
• Get some of the /proc filesystem information remotely from another machine using a distributed computing technology, such as HTTP REST calls or XML-RPC.

Exploring the /proc filesystem will give you a deeper understanding of Linux, and along the way, you'll get some useful practice with scripting and classic command-line tools.