Process name from its pid in linux

Process name from its pid in linux

up vote 13 down vote favorite 3	How to get a process name from his pid ?For example I execute cat file1.txt, but I want to figure out that cat command and its arguments since its pid in the system. Is there a struct to determine it or something similar? Any idea? c linux process system pid share | improve this question asked Mar 21 '13 at 10:47 TheForbidden 214 1 3 12
	1   possible duplicate of Get process name by PID –  Hasturkun Mar 21 '13 at 11:01 add a comment

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up vote 16 down vote accepted	There is not any general way to do this unix. Each OS has different ways to handle it and some are very hard. You mention Linux though. With Linux, the info is in the /proc filesystem. To get the command line for process id 9999, read the file /proc/9999/cmdline. share | improve this answer answered Mar 21 '13 at 10:56 Anubhab 966 5 20
	5   And to get the process name for process id 9999, read the file /proc/9999/comm. –  Skippy le Grand Gourou Jul 5 '13 at 15:02 add a comment

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up vote 9 down vote	On linux, you can look in /proc/. Try typing man proc for more information. The contents of /proc/$PID/cmdline will give you the command line that process $PID was run with. There is also /proc/self for examining yourself :) An alternative (e.g. on Mac OS X) is to use libproc. See libproc.h. share | improve this answer answered Mar 21 '13 at 11:00 robbie_c 1,194 5 19
	Can you please tell me the difference between your answer and mine? :) –  Anubhab Mar 21 '13 at 11:02 7   Your answer wasn't there when I started writing mine :) –  robbie_c Mar 21 '13 at 11:02 HAHAHA..:D .... –  Anubhab Mar 21 '13 at 11:03 2   hey don't fight ;) thanks to each one of you –  TheForbidden Mar 21 '13 at 12:54 add a comment

up vote 4 down vote

POSIX C does NOT support give a standard API for getting the process name by PID. In linux, you can get the name by LINUX Proc API: /proc/$PID/cmdline. And the code looks like these: const char* get_process_name_by_pid(const int pid) { char* name = (char*)calloc(1024,sizeof(char)); if(name){ sprintf(name, "/proc/%d/cmdline",pid); FILE* f = fopen(name,"r"); if(f){ size_t size; size = fread(name, sizeof(char), 1024, f); if(size>0){ if('\n'==name[size-1]) name[size-1]='\0'; } fclose(f); } } return name; }