PROCFS(5)

NAME
procfs - process file system

SYNOPSIS

    proc		/proc	procfs	rw 0 0

DESCRIPTION
The process file system, or procfs, implements a view of the system process table inside the file system. It is normally mounted on /proc, and is required for the complete operation of programs such as ps(1) and w(1).

The procfs provides a two-level view of process space, unlike the previous FreeBSD 1.1 procfs implementation. At the highest level, processes themselves are named, according to their process ids in decimal, with no leading zeros. There is also a special node called curproc which always refers to the process making the lookup request.

Each node is a directory which contains the following entries:

file
    the executable image (not currently implemented)

status
    the process's current status

ctl used to send control messages to the process, such as might be used by a debugger

mem the complete virtual address space of the process

note
    used to send signals to the process (not currently implemented)

notepg
    used to send signals to the process group that the process belongs to (not currently implemented)

regs
    the process register set

Each node is owned by the process's user, and belongs to that user's primary group, except for the mem node, which belongs to the kmem group instead. (This is not yet true, but will be eventually.)

This manual page should eventually document what you can do with all these nodes.

FILES

/proc
    normal mount point for the procfs.

AUTHOR
This manual page written by Garrett Wollman, based on the description provided by Jan-Simon Pendry.