From the course: Advanced Linux: The Linux Kernel

Unlock the full course today

Join today to access over 22,400 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.

Use the /proc and /sys filesystems

Use the /proc and /sys filesystems - CentOS Tutorial

From the course: Advanced Linux: The Linux Kernel

Start my 1-month free trial

Use the /proc and /sys filesystems

- [Instructor] More Surveying the Linux Kernel. Now let's talk about /proc or the proc filesystem, /sys, the sys filesystem, and some device files. Virtual filesystems are filesystems where data's not stored on disk. Instead, it's all this illusion and the proc and sys filesystems are these virtual filesystems. What happens with these kinds of filesystems is they look like directories with files, you do an ls and you see stuff, but the contents is dynamically generated when you look at it. When you cat a proc file, some corresponding function in the kernel gets called to show you the results. So, sometimes, that's for report information. How much memory is available in your kernel? How much is free? So you cat the corresponding file and the contents are displayed, kind of cool. The proc file system is mounted on /proc at boot time. So, by the time you can log in and all, it's got to be there. If /proc doesn't get…

Contents