Tag: cat


Environment Variables of a Running Process

When creating init scripts or trying to debug services on Linux it can be handy to know what the environment variables are for a running process. It turns out that you can retrieve these variables from /proc (along with lots of other rather useful information). The environment variables are located in /proc/$PID/environ where $PID is the ID of the process we are interested in.

cat can be used to print out the environment variables, but the entries are separated by null characters which makes them a bit difficult to read. To view the entries in a slightly more legible form we can pipe the output through tr to replace the null characters with new line characters:

cat /proc/$PID/environ | tr '\000' '\n'

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