Starting point
To learn about the Linux Kernel, the starting point is knowing that everything is a file. Instead of opening the Task Manager, you can inspect the content of /proc
folder. You can control everything on your running Linux instance only by inspecting some files.
For example:
Folder | Content |
---|---|
/proc |
All running process information |
/dev |
All available devices |
/sys |
The sysfs is used by programs such as udev to access device and device driver information. |
/var |
The standard folder where system writes data during the course of its operation. |
/usr |
This is one of the most important directories in the system as it contains all the user binaries, their documentation, libraries, header files, etc…. |
/bin |
This folder contains commands or scripts or executable which can be executed to accomplish a task. |
A good starting point is exploring /proc
folder. This folder has all information about all running process. All running process has a unique identifier called PID, that means Process IDentification. If you have a process with PID 472
, you can get all information about it using:
$ ls /proc/472
attr auxv cgroup cmdline comm cwd environ exe fd gid_map limits maps mountinfo mounts mountstats net ns oom_adj oom_score_adj root schedstat setgroups smaps stat statm status task uid_map
$ cat /proc/472/cmdline
java-classpath/home/vepo/.vscode-server/extensions/adamvoss.vscode-languagetool-3.8.0/lib/languagetool-languageserver/build/install/languagetool-languageserver/lib/*:/home/vepo/.vscode-server/extensions/adamvoss.vscode-languagetool-pt-3.8.0/lib/*App54469
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