In our last two posts, we tried to learn writing of a very minimal simple C program and how its its execution happens in real time. In this post, we will try to understand, when the program is actually executing, i.e. when program becomes a running process, what kind of files it creates in filesystem and information exported by the kernel related to this program.
Lets write a simple program creating a loop as additional to simple program we written in previous posts,
$ vim minimum-c-program.cmain() {
while(1);
}Above program just creates infinite loop using while(1) inside main, so that this program keeps on executing forever and not exits soon after executing.
$ gcc -o minimum-c-program_exe minimum-c-program.cNow, lets execute this binary created using above program as,
$ ./minimum-c-program_exeThis above program will keep on executing due to while(1), so now we need to open another terminal and need to check what is the process id assigned to this running program,
$ ps -ax | grep minimum-c-program_exe
13027 pts/1 R+ 0:05 ./minimum-c-program_exeSo this program is running as process id “13027” as seen above.
Every running process in Linux has one directory created in /proc with its process Id as directory name.
$ cd /proc/13027$ ls
attr comm fd map_files net personality setgroups syscall
autogroup coredump_filter fdinfo maps ns projid_map smaps task
auxv cpuset gid_map mem oom_adj root stack timers
cgroup cwd io mountinfo oom_score sched stat uid_map
clear_refs environ limits mounts oom_score_adj schedstat statm wchan
cmdline exe loginuid mountstats pagemap sessionid statusNow if we check the “cmdline” file contents using cat, it will show how we had started this program.
$ cat cmdline
./minimum-c-program_exe