The Process File System

The Process File System (PROCFS) resides in memory. It contains a list of active processes, by process number, in the /proc directory. Information in the /proc directory is used by commands like ps. Debuggers and other development tools can also access the address space of the processes by using file system calls. The following example shows a partial listing of the contents of the /proc directory:

$ ls -l /proc
total 144944
-rw-------   1 root     root           0 Dec 19 15:45 00000
-rw-------   1 root     root      196608 Dec 19 15:45 00001
-rw-------   1 root     root           0 Dec 19 15:45 00002
-rw-------   1 root     root     1028096 Dec 19 15:46 00073
-rw-------   1 root     root     1445888 Dec 19 15:46 00091
-rw-------   1 root     root     1142784 Dec 19 15:46 00093
-rw-------   1 root     root     1142784 Dec 19 15:46 00095
-rw-------   1 ignatz   staff    1576960 Dec 19 15:50 00226
-rw-------   1 ignatz   staff     192512 Dec 19 15:51 00236
-rw-------   1 ignatz   staff    1269760 Dec 19 15:52 00240
-rw-------   1 ignatz   staff    6090752 Dec 19 15:52 00241
-rw-------   1 ignatz   staff     188416 Dec 19 15:52 00247
-rw-------   1 ignatz   staff    2744320 Dec 19 15:52 00256

Do not delete the files in the /proc directory. Deleting processes from the /proc directory is not the best way to kill them. Remember, /proc files do not use disk space, so there is little reason to delete files from this directory.

The /proc directory does not require system administration.