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what’s in a process?

PID

process: process #129 reporting for duty!

USER and GROUP

from offscreen: who are you running as?
process: julia!

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

like PATH! you can set them with
$ env A=val./program

SIGNAL HANDLERS

process 1: I ignore SIGTERM!
process 2: I shut down safely!

WORKING DIRECTORY

Relative paths (./blah) are relative to the working directory! chdir changes it.

PARENT PID

PID 129 -> PID 147 -> PID 1 (init) is everyone’s ancestor

COMMAND LINE ARGUMENTS

see them in /proc/PID/cmdline

OPEN FILES

very open file has an offset.

process: I’ve read 8000 bytes of that one

MEMORY

heap! stack! shared libraries! the program’s binary! mmaped files!

THREADS

sometimes one
sometimes LOTS

CAPABILITIES

process 1: I have CAP_PTRACE
process 2: well I have CAP_SYS_ADMIN

NAMESPACES

process: I’m in the host network namespace
container process: I have my own namespace!

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