Managing Processes With Process Commands (/proc)

You can display detailed, technical information about processes or control active processes by using some of the process commands. Table 12–3 lists some of the /proc commands.

If a process becomes trapped in an endless loop, or if the process takes too long to execute, you might want to stop (kill) the process. For more information about stopping processes using the kill or the pkill command, see Chapter 12, Managing System Processes (Tasks).

The /proc file system is a directory hierarchy that contains additional subdirectories for state information and control functions.

The /proc file system also provides an xwatchpoint facility that is used to remap read-and-write permissions on the individual pages of a process's address space. This facility has no restrictions and is MT-safe.

Debugging tools have been modified to use /proc's xwatchpoint facility, which means that the entire xwatchpoint process is faster.

The following restrictions have been removed when you set xwatchpoints by using the dbx debugging tool:

• Setting xwatchpoints on local variables on the stack due to SPARC based system register windows

• Setting xwatchpoints on multithreaded processes

For more information, see the proc(4), and mdb(1) man pages.