Random notes on proc & process status
proc file system gives a view of the processes, including kernel, running in the Linux system. Writing into some of the files under /proc changes the state of the processes in memory. For e.g. you can change how much maximum shared memory you want the kernel to allow by changing the file /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax . This will take effect without rebooting the system, since it directly modifies the value of that particular kernel variable. But most of these changes are transient. Hence you will lose them when you reboot your system. You can examine the state of the process using proc file system. Each process running in the system will have an entry under /proc/pid , where pid is the process ID. There are good tutorials that explain about each entry under this directory. You can google for them. But I could not find explanation for some entries, particularly status file. Thats the objective of this blog. For a single-threaded process, you will find all the information about the state of t...