Linux 101: The "/proc" filesystem - A sneak peek into the kernel -



The proc filesystem is a filesystem that "represents" the kernel.
It gives us information about running processes, memory,...

Displaying the memory:


Displaying the filesystems supported by our system:

To display all the filesystem types supported by a system, we use:


Network information :

We could find network information in the "net" subfolder. It provides a view over different networking parameters:



Displaying the Linux version:

To display the Linux version, we use:


Processes and the  "/proc" filesystem:


All these numbers above are directories that represent different process IDs.
For example, if we go inside the directory "1" which represents the first process to start on the machine, we find the below directories:


For example in the "limits" file, we find:


Information about the CPU:

We can get that information either by looking into:


Or, we could achieve the same thing using:


The "Writable" kernel parameters:

We can find the writable parameters in the below directory:


The sysctl tool is used to modify the kernel parameters in "/proc/sys".

Example:


We find the same elements above as files when we check "/proc/sys/kernel".


For example, we can find the same element "acct" in the below folder:


The "sysctl" tool for modifying the "writable" kernel parameters:


The read-only parameters:

Most of the parameters in the "proc filesystem" are read-only.

Example:


We can notice that all the files (parameters) in "netfilter" are read-only.

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