The last few times I've been on the show I talked about some of the gewgaws that make Linux fun to use. Today I'll delve into the nitty-gritty of the operating system, the proc filesystem.

The /proc filesystem, usually located off of your root directory in /proc, is properly described as a window into your system's soul. Within it you find everything you ever wanted to know about the state and configuration of your system. You can also tune how the system runs by interacting with the "files" in the /proc filesystem.

The files in the /proc filesystem aren't actually files. The kernel uses the filesystem metaphor to give you (and your programs) an understandable interface into the kernel subsystems. For instance, suppose you wanted to know what kind of sound card was sitting off of your PCI bus? Here's what you type:

cat /proc/pci

You'll receive information about every device on your PCI bus. As an example, my sound card's entry (on my laptop) looks like this:

Bus 0, device 5, function 0:
Multimedia audio controller: Cirrus Logic CS 4614/22/24 [CrystalClear So usion Audio Accelerator] (rev 1).
IRQ 11.
Master Capable. Latency=64. Min Gnt=4.Max Lat=24.
Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xe8122000 [0xe8122fff].
Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xe8000000 [0xe80fffff].

This is handy as all get out, as I can use this information to debug sound issues.

Read more about the proc filesystem.

Chris DiBona works for OSDN. His personal homepage can be found at DiBona.com.

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