Listing Processes with libproc

I recently had to work on functionality to look through /proc/<pid> for information about processes, which would have entailed an annoying amount of file schlepping and string parsing. Fortunately there is procps, a very nice library to makes /proc access work very much like directory access via opendir(). It normalizes the procfs implementations of a number of OSes like Linux and Solaris, so you work with a common data structure and don't have to maintain a bunch of parsing code. However it doesn't abstract /proc very much: you still need to know what it is and what information is in each /proc file to make good use of the facility.

You start with a call to openproc(), which creates a PROCTAB* structure to iterate through running processes.

#include <proc/readproc.h>

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
  PROCTAB* proc = openproc(PROC_FILLMEM | PROC_FILLSTAT | PROC_FILLSTATUS);

A flag argument to openproc() tell it what kind of information you want. The library will skip processing files in /proc if it can.

PROC_FILLMEM	read /proc/<pid>/statm
PROC_FILLCOM	allocate and populate `cmdline'
PROC_FILLENV	allocate and populate `environ'
PROC_FILLUSR	look up user id number, fill in user name
PROC_FILLGRP	look up group id number, fill in group name
PROC_FILLSTATUS	read /proc/<pid>/status
PROC_FILLSTAT	read /proc/<pid>/status
PROC_FILLWCHAN	read function name from /proc/<pid>/statm
PROC_FILLARG	handled identically to PROC_FILLCOM

The PROCTAB is repeatedly passed to readproc(), which populates a proc_t for each running process.

proc_t proc_info;
memset(&proc_info, 0, sizeof(proc_info));
while (readproc(proc, &proc_info) != NULL) {
  printf("%20s:\t%5ld\t%5lld\t%5lld\n",
         proc_info.cmd, proc_info.resident,
         proc_info.utime, proc_info.stime);
}

When done, call closeproc() to release resources.

closeproc(proc);

Some sample output from my system:

  process:  pages utime   stime
   xinetd:    139       1       0
     sshd:    866      10      21
     bash:   1377      28      16
ssh-agent:    208      11       3
  portmap:    158       1       4
rpc.statd:    208       1       0

 
proc_t

The proc_t contains a great deal of information about the process.

typedef struct proc_t {
  int
    tid,         // (special)     task id, the POSIX thread ID (see also: tgid)
    ppid;        // stat,status   pid of parent process

  unsigned long long
    utime,       // stat          user-mode CPU time accumulated by process
    stime,       // stat          kernel-mode CPU time accumulated by process
    cutime,      // stat          cumulative utime of process and reaped children
    cstime,      // stat          cumulative stime of process and reaped children
    start_time;  // stat          start time of process -- seconds since 1-1-70

  long
    priority,    // stat          kernel scheduling priority
    nice,        // stat          standard unix nice level of process
    rss,         // stat          resident set size from /proc/#/stat (pages)
  ...etc...

The proc_t also contains this maddening little member variable:

  unsigned pcpu; // stat          %CPU usage (is not filled in by readproc)

Instantaneous CPU percentage is commonly desired, but is not tracked by the kernel and is therefore not available anywhere procps can read. Tracking a percentage has to be implemented in the application by taking a snapshot, waiting a little while, and taking another snapshot to learn the utime+stime spent during the interval. This is the reason why top shows all CPU percentages as 0.0% when it starts, and corrects them on the next interval. procps provides a convenient place to store the CPU percentage, but does not implement it in the library.