Submitted by “The proc filesystem is a special filesystem found on most UNIX-based systems.
It holds a great deal of information, in ASCII format, most of which is not very friendly to the average user. […] I’ve made a list of some of the files i find to be of most use.”
Not much to add to the story, just some positive, constructive feedback.
I really like these more technical stories that you’ve been linking. Its a nice break from the Piracy/Mobile device business stories. Not that those are ill placed, but I enjoy the technical stories more. While Linux is hardly a new operating system, its nice to examine interesting parts of it now and then.
http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/3/proc
Except the Plan9 implementation is more flexible and extensive being a distributed OS from the start and having /proc in each namespace (not just the global namespace like Linux/BSD).
So true. One of the things that I hate about the OS community is that sometimes the original source of components get forgotten. It probably would’ve been even better to have read an article that was mainly about /proc in Plan9. I’ve always considered it a shame that Plan9 didn’t take off the way that some of these other OSes did & now they’re leaching off of Plan9’s innovations.
Interesting. I really need to try Plan9 one of these days. It has very interesting ideas about how an OS should interact with the network.
What are your thoughts on FreeBSD deprecating /proc because it’s a security risk?
I’m going to be accused of trolling for that, but…
“Ah, too bad they just removed one of the few well-organized parts of the standard UNIX filesystem… Why didn’t they just remove the /usr and /opt mess instead, logically putting things in /bin, /lib and so on ? It would have made things must cleaner, and users who are not confused are better for security.”
sysctl does almost the same thing. And probably predates procfs. I guess that the BSDs tend to stay closer to the gold standard (UNIX) as much as possible so it was a natural choice to stay with sysctl.
So in a way it’s not worth it dealing with security issues from duplicate functionality. IMO it shouldn’t be a big loss.
Edited 2011-03-02 06:37 UTC
Isn’t /proc going away?
I think its deprecated in favor of /sys now and will be going away in the future.
The Linux /proc is not going away, what is slowly happening is that anything not specifically process related is being moved out of it and into /sys
This article should be in Linux category, not ‘General Unix’. Unices have different /proc contents and use binary files, which have to be accessed with special command line tools. The info here is valid only for Linux.