proc
PROC(5) Linux Programmer’s Manual PROC(5)
NAME
proc - process information pseudo-filesystem
DESCRIPTION
The proc filesystem is a pseudo-filesystem which is used as an inter-
face to kernel data structures. It is commonly mounted at /proc. 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.
/proc/[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.
/proc/[number]/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 0 charac-
ters. The command line arguments appear in this file as a set
of null-separated strings, with a further null byte after the
last string.
/proc/[number]/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 bash, you may use pwd -P.
/proc/[number]/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).)
/proc/[number]/exe
Under Linux 2.2 and 2.4 exe is a symbolic link containing the
actual path name of the executed command. The exe 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].
Under Linux 2.0 and earlier exe is a pointer to the binary
which was executed, and appears as a symbolic link. A read-
link(2) call on the exe special file under Linux 2.0 returns 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).
find(1) with the -inum option can be used to locate the file.
/proc/[number]/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 stan-
dard 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 symbol-
ically link /dev/fd to /proc/self/fd, in fact.
/proc/[number]/maps
A file containing the currently mapped memory regions and their
access permissions.
The format is:
address perms offset dev inode pathname
08048000-08056000 r-xp 00000000 03:0c 64593 /usr/sbin/gpm
08056000-08058000 rw-p 0000d000 03:0c 64593 /usr/sbin/gpm
08058000-0805b000 rwxp 00000000 00:00 0
40000000-40013000 r-xp 00000000 03:0c 4165 /lib/ld-2.2.4.so
40013000-40015000 rw-p 00012000 03:0c 4165 /lib/ld-2.2.4.so
4001f000-40135000 r-xp 00000000 03:0c 45494 /lib/libc-2.2.4.so
40135000-4013e000 rw-p 00115000 03:0c 45494 /lib/libc-2.2.4.so
4013e000-40142000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0
bffff000-c0000000 rwxp 00000000 00:00 0
where address is the address space in the process that it occu-
pies, 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 indi-
cates that no inode is associated with the memory region, as
the case would be with bss.
Under Linux 2.0 there is no field giving pathname.
/proc/[number]/mem
Via the mem file one can access the pages of a process’s memory
through open(2), read(2), and fseek(3).
/proc/[number]/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.
/proc/[number]/stat
Status information about the process. This is used by ps(1).
It is defined in /usr/src/linux/fs/proc/array.c.
The fields, in order, with their proper scanf(3) format speci-
fiers, 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 "RSDZTW" where R is run-
ning, S is sleeping in an interruptible wait, D is wait-
ing in uninterruptible disk sleep, Z is zombie, T is
traced or stopped (on a signal), and W is paging.
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_nr %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 %lu
The flags of the process. The math bit is decimal 4,
and the traced bit is decimal 10.
minflt %lu
The number of minor faults the process has made which
have not required loading a memory page from disk.
cminflt %lu
The number of minor faults that the process’s waited-for
children have made.
majflt %lu
The number of major faults the process has made which
have required loading a memory page from disk.
cmajflt %lu
The number of major faults that the process’s waited-for
children have made.
utime %lu
The number of jiffies that this process has been sched-
uled in user mode.
stime %lu
The number of jiffies that this process has been sched-
uled in kernel mode.
cutime %ld
The number of jiffies that this process’s waited-for
children have been scheduled in user mode. (See also
times(2).)
cstime %ld
The number of jiffies that this process’ waited-for
children have been scheduled in kernel mode.
priority %ld
The standard nice value, plus fifteen. The value is
never negative in the kernel.
nice %ld
The nice value ranges from 19 (nicest) to -19 (not nice
to others).
num_threads %ld
Number of threads in this process (since Linux 2.6).
Before kernel 2.6, this field was hard coded to 0 as a
placeholder for an earlier removed field.
itrealvalue %ld
The time in jiffies before the next SIGALRM is sent to
the process due to an interval timer.
starttime %lu
The time in jiffies the process started after system
boot.
vsize %lu
Virtual memory size in bytes.
rss %ld
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 %lu
Current limit in bytes on the rss of the process (usu-
ally 4294967295 on i386).
startcode %lu
The address above which program text can run.
endcode %lu
The address below which program text can run.
startstack %lu
The address of the start of the stack.
kstkesp %lu
The current value of esp (stack pointer), as found in
the kernel stack page for the process.
kstkeip %lu
The current EIP (instruction pointer).
signal %lu
The bitmap of pending signals (usually 0).
blocked %lu
The bitmap of blocked signals (usually 0, 2 for shells).
sigignore %lu
The bitmap of ignored signals.
sigcatch %lu
The bitmap of catched signals.
wchan %lu
This is the "channel" in which the process is waiting.
It 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.)
nswap %lu
Number of pages swapped - not maintained.
cnswap %lu
Cumulative nswap for child processes - not maintained.
exit_signal %d
Signal to be sent to parent when we die.
processor %d
CPU number last executed on. rt_priority %lu (since
Linux 2.5.19) Real-time scheduling priority (see
sched_setscheduler(2)).
policy %lu (since Linux 2.5.19)
Scheduling policy (see sched_setscheduler(2)).
/proc/[number]/statm
Provides information about memory status in pages. The columns
are:
size total program size
resident resident set size
share shared pages
trs text (code)
drs data/stack
lrs library
dt dirty pages
/proc/[number]/status
Provides much of the information in /proc/[number]/stat and
/proc/[number]/statm in a format that’s easier for humans to
parse.
/proc/apm
Advanced power management version and battery information when
CONFIG_APM is defined at kernel compilation time.
/proc/bus
Contains subdirectories for installed busses.
/proc/bus/pccard
Subdirectory for pcmcia devices when CONFIG_PCMCIA is set at
kernel compilation time.
/proc/bus/pccard/drivers
/proc/bus/pci
Contains various bus subdirectories and pseudo-files containing
information about pci busses, installed devices, and device
drivers. Some of these files are not ASCII.
/proc/bus/pci/devices
Information about pci devices. They may be accessed through
lspci(8) and setpci(8).
/proc/cmdline
Arguments passed to the Linux kernel at boot time. Often done
via a boot manager such as lilo(1).
/proc/cpuinfo
This is a collection of CPU and system architecture dependent
items, for each supported architecture a different list. Two
common entries are processor which gives CPU number and
bogomips; a system constant that is calculated during kernel
initialization. SMP machines have information for each CPU.
/proc/devices
Text listing of major numbers and device groups. This can be
used by MAKEDEV scripts for consistency with the kernel.
/proc/dma
This is a list of the registered ISA DMA (direct memory access)
channels in use.
/proc/driver
Empty subdirectory.
/proc/execdomains
List of the execution domains (ABI personalities).
/proc/fb
Frame buffer information when CONFIG_FB is defined during ker-
nel compilation.
/proc/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.
/proc/fs
Empty subdirectory.
/proc/ide
This directory exists on systems with the ide bus. There are
directories for each ide channel and attached device. Files
include:
cache buffer size in KB
capacity number of sectors
driver driver version
geometry physical and logical geometry
identify in hexidecimal
media media type
model manufacturer’s model number
settings drive settings
smart_thresholds in hexidecimal
smart_values in hexidecimal
The hdparm(8) utility provides access to this information in a
friendly format.
/proc/interrupts
This is used to record the number of interrupts per each IRQ on
(at least) the i386 architechure. Very easy to read format-
ting, done in ASCII.
/proc/iomem
I/O memory map in Linux 2.4.
/proc/ioports
This is a list of currently registered Input-Output port
regions that are in use.
/proc/kcore
This file represents the physical memory of the system and is
stored in the ELF core file format. With this pseudo-file, and
an unstripped kernel (/usr/src/linux/vmlinux) binary, GDB can
be used to examine the current state of any kernel data struc-
tures.
The total length of the file is the size of physical memory
(RAM) plus 4KB.
/proc/kmsg
This file can be used instead of the syslog(2) system call to
read 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) pro-
gram.
/proc/ksyms
This holds the kernel exported symbol definitions used by the
modules(X) tools to dynamically link and bind loadable modules.
/proc/loadavg
The load average numbers give the number of jobs in the run
queue (state R) or waiting for disk I/O (state D) averaged over
1, 5, and 15 minutes. They are the same as the load average
numbers given by uptime(1) and other programs.
/proc/locks
This file shows current file locks (flock(2) and fcntl(2)) and
leases (fcntl(2)).
/proc/malloc
This file is only present if CONFIGDEBUGMALLOC was defined dur-
ing compilation.
/proc/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.
/proc/mounts
This is a list of all the file systems currently mounted on the
system. The format of this file is documented in fstab(5).
/proc/modules
A text list of the modules that have been loaded by the system.
See also lsmod(8).
/proc/mtrr
Memory Type Range Registers. See /usr/src/linux/Documenta-
tion/mtrr.txt for details.
/proc/net
various net pseudo-files, all of which give the status of some
part of the networking layer. These files contain ASCII struc-
tures and are, therefore, readable with cat. However, the
standard netstat(8) suite provides much cleaner access to these
files.
/proc/net/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 Mask Device
192.168.0.50 0x1 0x2 00:50:BF:25:68:F3 * eth0
192.168.0.250 0x1 0xc 00:00:00:00:00:00 * eth0
Here ’IP address’ is the IPv4 address of the machine and 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
data link layer mapping for that IP address if it is known.
/proc/net/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 |bytes packets errs drop fifo frame compressed multicast|bytes packets errs drop fifo colls carrier compressed
lo: 2776770 11307 0 0 0 0 0 0 2776770 11307 0 0 0 0 0 0
eth0: 1215645 2751 0 0 0 0 0 0 1782404 4324 0 0 0 427 0 0
ppp0: 1622270 5552 1 0 0 0 0 0 354130 5669 0 0 0 0 0 0
tap0: 7714 81 0 0 0 0 0 0 7714 81 0 0 0 0 0 0
/proc/net/dev_mcast
Defined in /usr/src/linux/net/core/dev_mcast.c:
indx ifterface_name dmi_u dmi_g dmi_address
2 eth0 1 0 01005e000001
3 eth1 1 0 01005e000001
4 eth2 1 0 01005e000001
/proc/net/igmp
Internet Group Management Protocol. Defined in
/usr/src/linux/net/core/igmp.c.
/proc/net/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.
/proc/net/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 ker-
nel 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.
/proc/net/snmp
This file holds the ASCII data needed for the IP, ICMP, TCP,
and UDP management information bases for an snmp agent.
/proc/net/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 ker-
nel 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.
/proc/net/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 ker-
nel 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
/proc/net/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
Here ’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 sta-
tus of the socket. Currently, type is always ’1’ (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.
/proc/partitions
Contains major and minor numbers of each partition as well as
number of blocks and partition name.
/proc/pci
This is a listing of all PCI devices found during kernel ini-
tialization and their configuration.
/proc/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 sub-
system or switch certain features on or off.
/proc/scsi/scsi
This is a listing of all SCSI devices known to the kernel. The
listing is similar to the one seen during bootup. scsi cur-
rently supports only the add-single-device command which allows
root to add a hotplugged device to the list of known devices.
An echo ’scsi add-single-device 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.
/proc/scsi/[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 that registered at least one SCSI HBA. Every directory
contains one file per registered host. Every host-file is named
after the number the host was assigned during initialization.
Reading these files will usually show driver and host configu-
ration, 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.
/proc/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.
/proc/slabinfo
Information about kernel caches. The columns are:
cache-name
num-active-objs
total-objs
object-size
num-active-slabs
total-slabs
num-pages-per-slab
See slabinfo(5) for details.
/proc/stat
kernel/system statistics. Varies with architecture. Common
entries include:
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.
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.
disk_io: (2,0):(31,30,5764,1,2) (3,0):...
(major,minor):(noinfo, read_io_ops, blks_read,
write_io_ops, blks_written)
ctxt 115315
The number of context switches that the system under-
went.
btime 769041601
boot time, in seconds since the epoch (January 1, 1970).
processes 86031
Number of forks since boot.
/proc/swaps
Swap areas in use. See also swapon(8).
/proc/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 the sysctl(2) system call. Presently,
there are subdirectories abi, debug, dev, fs, kernel, net,
proc, rxrpc, sunrpc and vm that each contain more files and
subdirectories.
/proc/sys/abi
This directory may contain files with application binary infor-
mation. On some systems, it is not present.
/proc/sys/debug
This directory may be empty.
/proc/sys/dev
This directory contains device specific information (eg
dev/cdrom/info). On some systems, it may be empty.
/proc/sys/fs
This contains the subdirectory binfmt_misc and files dentry-
state, dir-notify-enable, dquot-nr, file-max, file-nr, inode-
max, inode-nr, inode-state, lease-break-time, leases-enable,
overflowgid, overflowuid super-max and super-nr with function
fairly clear from the name.
/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc
Documentation for files in this directory can in the kernel
sources in Documentation/binfmt_misc.txt.
/proc/sys/fs/dentry-state
This file contains six numbers, nr_dentry, nr_unused, age_limit
(age in seconds), want_pages (pages requested by system) and
two dummy values. nr_dentry seems to be 0 all the time.
nr_unused seems to be the number of unused dentries. age_limit
is the age in seconds after which dcache entries can be
reclaimed when memory is short and want_pages is nonzero when
the kernel has called shrink_dcache_pages() and the dcache
isn’t pruned yet.
/proc/sys/fs/dir-notify-enable
This file can be used to disable or enable the dnotify inter-
face described in fcntl(2) on a system-wide basis. A value of
0 in this file disables the interface, and a value of 1 enables
it.
/proc/sys/fs/dquot-max
This file shows the maximum number of cached disk quota
entries. On some (2.4) systems, it is not present. If the
number of free cached disk quotas is very low and you have some
awesome number of simultaneous system users, you might want to
raise the limit.
/proc/sys/fs/dquot-nr
This file shows the number of allocated disk quota entries and
the number of free disk quota entries.
/proc/sys/fs/file-max
This file defines a system-wide limit on the number of open
files for all processes. (See also setrlimit(2), which can be
used by a process to set the per-process limit, RLIMIT_NOFILE,
on the number of files it may open.) If you get lots of error
messages about running out of file handles, try increasing this
value:
echo 100000 > /proc/sys/fs/file-max
The kernel constant NR_OPEN imposes an upper limit on the value
that may be placed in file-max.
If you increase /proc/sys/fs/file-max, be sure to increase
/proc/sys/fs/inode-max to 3-4 times the new value of
/proc/sys/fs/file-max, or you will run out of inodes.
/proc/sys/fs/file-nr
This (read-only) file gives the number of files presently
opened. It contains three numbers: The number of allocated
file handles, the number of free file handles and the maximum
number of file handles. The kernel allocates file handles
dynamically, but it doesn’t free them again. If the number of
allocated files is close to the
maximum, you should consider increasing the maximum. When the
number of free file handles is large, you’ve encountered a peak
in your usage of file handles and you probably don’t need to
increase the maximum.
/proc/sys/fs/inode-max
This file contains the maximum number of in-memory inodes. On
some (2.4) systems, it may not be present. This value should be
3-4 times larger than the value in file-max, since stdin, std-
out and network sockets also need an inode to handle them. When
you regularly run out of inodes, you need to increase this
value.
/proc/sys/fs/inode-nr
This file contains the first two values from inode-state.
/proc/sys/fs/inode-state
This file contains seven numbers: nr_inodes, nr_free_inodes,
preshrink and four dummy values. nr_inodes is the number of
inodes the system has allocated. This can be slightly more
than inode-max because Linux allocates them one pageful at a
time. nr_free_inodes represents the number of free inodes.
preshrink is nonzero when the nr_inodes > inode-max and the
system needs to prune the inode list instead of allocating
more.
/proc/sys/fs/lease-break-time
This file specifies the grace period that the kernel grants to
a process holding a file lease (fcntl(2)) after it has sent a
signal to that process notifying it that another process is
waiting to open the file. If the lease holder does not remove
or downgrade the lease within this grace period, the kernel
forcibly breaks the lease.
/proc/sys/fs/leases-enable
This file can be used to enable or disable file leases
(fcntl(2)) on a system-wide basis. If this file contains the
value 0, leases are disabled. A non-zero value enables leases.
/proc/sys/fs/overflowgid and /proc/sys/fs/overflowuid
These files allow you to change the value of the fixed UID and
GID. The default is 65534. Some filesystems only support
16-bit UIDs and GIDs, although in Linux UIDs and GIDs are 32
bits. When one of these filesystems is mounted with writes
enabled, any UID or GID that would exceed 65535 is translated
to the overflow value before being written to disk.
/proc/sys/fs/super-max
This file controls the maximum number of superblocks, and thus
the maximum number of mounted filesystems the kernel can have.
You only need to increase super-max if you need to mount more
filesystems than the current value in super-max allows you to.
/proc/sys/fs/super-nr
This file contains the number of filesystems currently mounted.
/proc/sys/kernel
This directory contains files acct, cad_pid, cap-bound,
core_pattern, core_uses_pid, ctrl-alt-del, dentry-state,
domainname, hotplug, hostname, htab-reclaim (PowerPC only),
java-appletviewer (binfmt_java, obsolete), java-interpreter
(binfmt_java, obsolete), l2cr (PowerPC only), modprobe, msgmax,
msgmnb, msgmni, osrelease, ostype, overflowgid, overflowuid,
panic, panic_on_oops, pid_max, powersave-nap (PowerPC only),
printk, pty, random, real-root-dev, reboot-cmd (SPARC only),
rtsig-max, rtsig-nr, sem, sg-big-buff, shmall, shmmax, shmmni,
sysrq, tainted, threads-max, version and zero-paged (PowerPC
only) with function fairly clear from the name.
/proc/sys/kernel/acct
This file contains three numbers: highwater, lowwater and fre-
quency. If BSD-style process accounting is enabled these val-
ues control its behaviour. If free space on filesystem where
the log lives goes below lowwater percent accounting suspends.
If free space gets above highwater percent accounting resumes.
Frequency determines how often the kernel checks the amount of
free space (value is in seconds). Default values are 4, 2 and
30. That is, suspend accounting if <= 2% of space is free;
resume it if >= 4% of space is free; consider information about
amount of free space valid for 30 seconds.
/proc/sys/kernel/cap-bound
This file holds the value of the kernel capability bounding set
(expressed as a signed decimal number). This set is ANDed
against the capabilities permitted to a process during exec.
/proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern
This file (new in Linux 2.5) provides finer control over the
form of a core filename than the obsolete /proc/sys/ker-
nel/core_uses_pid file described below. The name for a core
file is controlled by defining a template in /proc/sys/ker-
nel/core_pattern. The template can contain % specifiers which
are substituted by the following values when a core file is
created:
%% A single % character
%p PID of dumped process
%u real UID of dumped process
%g real GID of dumped process
%s number of signal causing dump
%t time of dump (secs since 0:00h, 1 Jan 1970)
%h hostname (same as the ’nodename’
returned by uname(2))
%e executable filename
A single % at the end of the template is dropped from the core
filename, as is the combination of a % followed by any charac-
ter other than those listed above. All other characters in the
template become a literal part of the core filename. The maxi-
mum size of the resulting core filename is 64 bytes. The
default value in this file is "core". For backward compatibil-
ity, if /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern does not include "%p" and
/proc/sys/kernel/core_uses_pid is non-zero, then .PID will be
appended to the core filename.
/proc/sys/kernel/core_uses_pid
This file can be used control the naming of a core dump file on
Linux 2.4. If this file contains the value 0, then a core dump
file is simply named core. If this file contains a non-zero
value, then the core dump file includes the process ID in a
name of the form core.PID.
/proc/sys/kernel/ctrl-alt-del
This file controls the handling of Ctrl-Alt-Del from the key-
board. When the value in this file is 0, Ctrl-Alt-Del is
trapped and sent to the init(1) program to handle a graceful
restart. When the value is > 0, Linux’s reaction to a Vulcan
Nerve Pinch (tm) will be an immediate reboot, without even
syncing its dirty buffers. Note: when a program (like dosemu)
has the keyboard in ’raw’ mode, the ctrl-alt-del is intercepted
by the program before it ever reaches the kernel tty layer, and
it’s up to the program to decide what to do with it.
/proc/sys/kernel/hotplug
This file contains the path for the hotplug policy agent. The
default value in this file "/sbin/hotplug".
/proc/sys/kernel/domainname and /proc/sys/kernel/hostname
can be used to set the NIS/YP domainname and the hostname of
your box in exactly the same way as the commands domainname and
hostname, i.e.:
# echo "darkstar" > /proc/sys/kernel/hostname
# echo "mydomain" > /proc/sys/kernel/domainname
has the same effect as
# hostname "darkstar"
# domainname "mydomain"
Note, however, that the classic darkstar.frop.org has the host-
name "darkstar" and DNS (Internet Domain Name Server) domain-
name "frop.org", not to be confused with the NIS (Network
Information Service) or YP (Yellow Pages) domainname. These two
domain names are in general different. For a detailed discus-
sion see the hostname(1) man page.
/proc/sys/kernel/htab-reclaim
(PowerPC only) If this file is set to a non-zero value, the
PowerPC htab (see kernel file Documentation/pow-
erpc/ppc_htab.txt) is pruned each time the system hits the idle
loop.
/proc/sys/kernel/l2cr
(PowerPC only) This file contains a flag that controls the L2
cache of G3 processor boards. If 0, the cache is disabled.
Enabled if nonzero.
/proc/sys/kernel/modprobe
This file is described by the kernel source file Documenta-
tion/kmod.txt.
/proc/sys/kernel/msgmax
This file defines a system-wide limit specifying the maximum
number of bytes in a single message written on a System V mes-
sage queue.
/proc/sys/kernel/msgmni
This file defines the system-wide limit on the number of mes-
sage queue identifiers. (This file is only present in Linux
2.4 onwards.)
/proc/sys/kernel/msgmnb
This file defines a system-wide paramter used to initialise the
msg_qbytes setting for subsequenly created message queues. The
msg_qbytes setting specifies the maximum number of bytes that
may be written to the message queue.
/proc/sys/kernel/ostype and /proc/sys/kernel/osrelease
These files give substrings of /proc/version.
/proc/sys/kernel/overflowgid and /proc/sys/kernel/overflowuid
These files duplicate the files /proc/sys/fs/overflowgid and
/proc/sys/fs/overflowuid.
/proc/sys/kernel/panic
gives read/write 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. When you use the software watchdog device driver,
the recommended setting is 60.
/proc/sys/kernel/panic_on_oops
This file (new in Linux 2.5) controls the kernel’s behaviour
when an oops or BUG is encountered. If this file contains 0,
then the system tries to continue operation. If it contains 1,
then the system delays a few seconds (to give klogd time to
record the oops output) and then panics. If the /proc/sys/ker-
nel/panic file is also non-zero then the machine will be
rebooted.
/proc/sys/kernel/pid_max
This file (new in Linux 2.5) specifies the value at which PIDs
wrap around (i.e., the value in this file is one greater than
the maximum PID). The default value for this file, 32768,
results in the same range of PIDs as on earlier kernels. The
value in this file can be set to any value up to 2^22
(PID_MAX_LIMIT, approximately 4 million).
/proc/sys/kernel/powersave-nap (PowerPC only)
This file contains a flag. If set, Linux-PPC will use the
’nap’ mode of powersaving, otherwise the ’doze’ mode will be
used.
/proc/sys/kernel/printk
The four values in this file are console_loglevel, default_mes-
sage_loglevel, minimum_console_level and default_con-
sole_loglevel. These values influence printk() behavior when
printing or logging error messages. See syslog(2) for more info
on the different loglevels. Messages with a higher priority
than console_loglevel will be printed to the console. Messages
without an explicit priority will be printed with priority
default_message_level. minimum_console_loglevel is the minimum
(highest) value to which console_loglevel can be set.
default_console_loglevel is the default value for con-
sole_loglevel.
/proc/sys/kernel/pty (since Linux 2.6.4)
This directory contains two files relating to the number of
Unix 98 pseudo-terminals (see pts(4)) on the system.
/proc/sys/kernel/pty/max
This file defines the maximum number of pseudo-terminals.
/proc/sys/kernel/pty/nr
This read-only file indicates how many pseudo-terminals are
currently in use.
/proc/sys/kernel/random
This directory contains various parameters controlling the
operation of the file /dev/random.
/proc/sys/kernel/real-root-dev
This file is documented in the kernel source file Documenta-
tion/initrd.txt.
/proc/sys/kernel/reboot-cmd (Sparc only)
This file seems to be a way to give an argument to the SPARC
ROM/Flash boot loader. Maybe to tell it what to do after
rebooting?
/proc/sys/kernel/rtsig-max
This file can be used to tune the maximum number of POSIX real-
time (queued) signals that can be outstanding in the system.
/proc/sys/kernel/rtsig-nr
This file shows the number POSIX realtime signals currently
queued.
/proc/sys/kernel/sem (since Linux 2.4)
This file contains 4 numbers defining limits for System V IPC
semaphores. These fields are, in order:
SEMMSL The maximum semaphores per semaphore set.
SEMMNS A system-wide limit on the number of semaphores in all
semaphore sets.
SEMOPM The maximum number of operations that may be specified
in a semop(2) call.
SEMMNI A system-wide limit on the maximum number of semaphore
identifiers.
/proc/sys/kernel/sg-big-buff
This file shows the size of the generic SCSI device (sg)
buffer. You can’t tune it just yet, but you could change it on
compile time by editing include/scsi/sg.h and changing the
value of SG_BIG_BUFF. However, there shouldn’t be any reason
to change this value.
/proc/sys/kernel/shmall
This file contains the system-wide limit on the total number of
pages of System V shared memory.
/proc/sys/kernel/shmmax
This file can be used to query and set the run time limit on
the maximum (System V IPC) shared memory segment size that can
be created. Shared memory segments up to 1Gb are now supported
in the kernel. This value defaults to SHMMAX.
/proc/sys/kernel/shmmni
(available in Linux 2.4 and onwards) This file specifies the
system-wide maximum number of System V shared memory segments
that can be created.
/proc/sys/kernel/version
contains a string like:
#5 Wed Feb 25 21:49:24 MET 1998.TP
The ’#5’ means that this is the fifth kernel built from this
source base and the date behind it indicates the time the ker-
nel was built.
/proc/sys/kernel/zero-paged (PowerPC only)
This file contains a flag. When enabled (non-zero), Linux-PPC
will pre-zero pages in the idle loop, possibly speeding up
get_free_pages.
/proc/sys/net
This directory contains networking stuff.
/proc/sys/proc
This directory may be empty.
/proc/sys/sunrpc
This directory supports Sun remote procedure call for network
file system (NFS). On some systems, it is not present.
/proc/sys/vm
This directory contains files for memory management tuning,
buffer and cache management.
/proc/sysvipc
Subdirectory containing the pseudo-files msg, sem and shm.
These files list the System V Interprocess Communication (IPC)
objects (respectively: message queues, semaphores, and shared
memory) that currently exist on the system, providing similar
information to that available via ipcs(1). These files have
headers and are formatted (one IPC object per line) for easy
understanding. ipc(5) provides further background on the
information shown by these files.
/proc/tty
Subdirectory containing the psuedo-files and subdirectories for
tty drivers and line disciplines.
/proc/uptime
This file contains two numbers: the uptime of the system (sec-
onds), and the amount of time spent in idle process (seconds).
/proc/version
This string identifies the kernel version that is currently
running. It includes the contents of /proc/sys/ostype,
/proc/sys/osrelease and /proc/sys/version. For example:
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),
chroot(2), mmap(2), readlink(2), syslog(2), slabinfo(5), hier(7),
arp(8), dmesg(8), hdparm(8), ifconfig(8), lsmod(8), lspci(8), net-
stat(8), procinfo(8), route(8), /usr/src/linux/Documentation/filesys-
tems/proc.txt
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. Alternatively, echo ‘cat <file>‘ works well.
This manual page is incomplete, possibly inaccurate, and is the kind
of thing that needs to be updated very often.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The material on /proc/sys/fs and /proc/sys/kernel is closely based on
kernel source documentation files written by Rik van Riel.
2003-05-27 PROC(5)
