proc_pid_exe(5) — Linux manual page

NAME | DESCRIPTION | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

proc_pid_exe(5)            File Formats Manual           proc_pid_exe(5)

NAME         top

       /proc/pid/exe - symbolic link to program pathname

DESCRIPTION         top

       /proc/pid/exe
              Under Linux 2.2 and later, this file is a symbolic link
              containing the actual pathname of the executed command.
              This symbolic link can be dereferenced normally;
              attempting to open it will open the executable.  You can
              even type /proc/pid/exe to run another copy of the same
              executable that is being run by process pid.  If the
              pathname has been unlinked, the symbolic link will contain
              the string ' (deleted)' appended to the original pathname.
              In a multithreaded process, the contents of this symbolic
              link are not available if the main thread has already
              terminated (typically by calling pthread_exit(3)).

              Permission to dereference or read (readlink(2)) this
              symbolic link is governed by a ptrace access mode
              PTRACE_MODE_READ_FSCREDS check; see ptrace(2).

              Under Linux 2.0 and earlier, /proc/pid/exe is a pointer to
              the binary which was executed, and appears as a symbolic
              link.  A readlink(2) call on this file under Linux 2.0
              returns a string in the format:

                  [device]:inode

              For example, [0301]:1502 would be inode 1502 on device
              major 03 (IDE, MFM, etc. drives) minor 01 (first partition
              on the first drive).

              find(1) with the -inum option can be used to locate the
              file.

SEE ALSO         top

       proc(5)

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the man-pages (Linux kernel and C library
       user-space interface documentation) project.  Information about
       the project can be found at 
       ⟨https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/⟩.  If you have a bug report
       for this manual page, see
       ⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING⟩.
       This page was obtained from the tarball man-pages-6.9.1.tar.gz
       fetched from
       ⟨https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/⟩ on
       2024-06-26.  If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML
       version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-
       to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or
       improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not
       part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

Linux man-pages 6.9.1          2024-05-02                proc_pid_exe(5)

Pages that refer to this page: PR_SET_MM_EXE_FILE(2const)