How to get the command line args passed to a running process on unix linux systems

Question

On SunOS there is pargs command that prints the command line arguments passed to the running process    Is there is any similar command on other Unix environments

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Another variant of printing  proc PID cmdline with spaces in Linux is   cat -v  proc PID cmdline   sed  s        g   amp  amp  echo   In this way cat prints NULL characters as    and then you replace them with a space using sed  echo prints a newline

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This will do the trick   xargs -0  lt   proc  lt pid gt  cmdline   Without the xargs  there will be no spaces between the arguments  because they have been converted to NULs

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There are several options   ps -fp  lt pid gt  cat  proc  lt pid gt  cmdline   sed -e  s  x00   g   echo   There is more info in  proc  lt pid gt  on Linux  just have a look   On other Unixes things might be different  The ps command will work everywhere  the  proc stuff is OS specific  For example on AIX there is no cmdline in  proc

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On Solaris       ps -eo pid comm   similar can be used on unix like systems

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In addition to all the above ways to convert the text  if you simply use  strings   it will make the output on separate lines by default  With the added benefit that it may also prevent any chars that may scramble your terminal from appearing   Both output in one command   strings  proc  cmdline  proc  environ  The real question is    is there a way to see the real command line of a process in Linux that has been altered so that the cmdline contains the altered text instead of the actual command that was run

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You can simply use   ps -o args  -f -p ProcessPid

User · Answer

On Linux  with bash  to output as quoted args so you can edit the command and rerun it   lt  proc    pid   cmdline xargs --no-run-if-empty -0 -n1       bash -c  printf   q      1     dev null  echo   On Solaris  with bash  tested with 3 2 51 1 -release  and without gnu userland   IFS    002  tmpargs      pargs    pid            usr bin sed -n  s  argv   0-9   1         gp          tr   n    002      for tmparg in    tmpargs       do     printf   q       echo -e    tmparg      done  echo   Linux bash Example  paste in terminal         setup intial args argv    bin bash -c     usr bin sleep 10  echo      dev null  BEGIN  system  sleep 2      this is         some   args     n   that     000     002   need   quot    t  ing        run in background    argv       amp      recover into eval string that assigns it to argv recovered eval me        printf  argv recovered          lt  proc        cmdline xargs --no-run-if-empty -0 -n1           bash -c  printf   q      1     dev null     printf     n        do eval eval    eval me       verify match if       declare -p argv           declare -p argv recovered   sed  s argv recovered argv         then     echo MATCH else     echo NO MATCH fi     Output   MATCH   Solaris Bash Example        setup intial args argv    bin bash -c     usr bin sleep 10  echo      dev null  BEGIN  system  sleep 2      this is         some   args     n   that     000     002   need   quot    t  ing        run in background    argv       amp  pargs        ps -fp         declare -p tmpargs eval me        printf  argv recovered         IFS    002  tmpargs      pargs                     usr bin sed -n  s  argv   0-9   1         gp              tr   n    002          for tmparg in    tmpargs       do         printf   q       echo -e    tmparg          done  echo     printf     n        do eval eval    eval me        verify match if       declare -p argv           declare -p argv recovered   sed  s argv recovered argv         then     echo MATCH else     echo NO MATCH fi     Output   MATCH

User · Answer

You can use pgrep with -f  full command line  and -l  long description    pgrep -l -f PatternOfProcess   This method has a crucial difference with any of the other responses  it works on CygWin  so you can use it to obtain the full command line of any process running under Windows  execute as elevated if you want data about any elevated admin process   Any other method for doing this on Windows is more awkward   for example    Furthermore  in my tests  the pgrep way has been the only system that worked to obtain the full path for scripts running inside CygWin s python

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If you want to get a long-as-possible  not sure what limits there are   similar to Solaris  pargs  you can use this on Linux  amp  OSX   ps -ww -o pid command  -p  lt pid gt

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Full commandline  For Linux  amp  Unix System you can use ps -ef   grep process name to get the full command line   On SunOS systems  if you want to get full command line  you can use    usr ucb ps -auxww   grep -i process name   To get the full command line you need to become super user   List of arguments  pargs -a PROCESS ID   will give a detailed list of arguments passed to a process  It will output the array of arguments in like this   argv o   first argument argv 1   second   argv     and so on     I didn t find any similar command for Linux  but I would use the following command to get similar output   tr   0    n   lt   proc  lt pid gt  environ

User · Answer

try  ps -n in a linux terminal  This will show    1 All processes RUNNING  their command line and their PIDs    The program intiate the processes     Afterwards you will know which process to kill

User · Answer

Rather than using multiple commands to edit the stream  just use one - tr translates one character to another   tr   0       lt  proc  lt pid gt  cmdline

User · Answer

On Linux  cat  proc  lt pid gt  cmdline   get s you the commandline of the process  including args  but with all whitespaces changed to NUL characters

[linux] How to get the command line args passed to a running process on unix/linux systems?

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