See full command of running stopped container in Docker

Question

How can I see the full command of a running container process in Docker     docker ps --all CONTAINER ID    IMAGE          COMMAND                 CREATED          STATUS                     PORTS    NAMES 5b6291859b61    nginx 1 7 8     nginx -g  daemon of    4 minutes ago    Exited  0  4 minutes ago            thirsty brattain   I can only see  nginx -g  daemon of    here  not the full command

User · Answer

Use runlike from git repository https   github com lavie runlike  To install runlike  pip install runlike   As it accept container id as an argument so to extract container id use following command  docker ps -a -q   You are good to use runlike to extract complete docker run command with following command   runlike  lt docker container ID gt

User · Answer

docker ps --no-trunc will display the full command along with the other details of the running containers

User · Answer

Use   docker inspect -f     Name      Config Cmd      docker ps -a -q        it does a  docker inspect  for all containers

User · Answer

Use   docker inspect -f     Path      Args       Id       docker ps -a -q    That will display the command path and arguments  similar to docker ps

User · Answer

TL-DR   docker ps --no-trunc and docker inspect CONTAINER provide the entrypoint executed to start the container  along the command passed to  but that may miss some parts such as   ANY VAR  because container environment variables are not printed as resolved      To overcome that  docker inspect CONTAINER has an advantage because it also allow to retrieve separately env variables and their values defined in the container from the Config Env property      docker ps and docker inspect provide information about the executed entrypoint and its command  Often  that is a wrapper entrypoint script   sh  and not the  real  program started by the container  To get information on that  requesting process information with ps or  proc 1 cmdline help         1  docker ps --no-trunc  It prints the entrypoint and the command executed for all running containers  While it prints the command passed to the entrypoint  if we pass that    it doesn t show value of docker env variables  such as  FOO or   FOO    If our containers use env variables  it may be not enough       For example  run an alpine container     docker run --name alpine-example -e MY VAR  var alpine latest sh -c  ls  MY VAR    When use docker -ps such as         docker ps -a  --filter name alpine-example  --no-trunc   It prints      CONTAINER ID           IMAGE               COMMAND                CREATED             STATUS                     PORTS               NAMES 5b064a6de6d8417      alpine latest        sh -c  ls  MY VAR     2 minutes ago       Exited  0  2 minutes ago                       alpine-example   We see the command passed to the entrypoint   sh -c  ls  MY VAR  but  MY VAR  is indeed not resolved      2  docker inspect CONTAINER  When we inspect the alpine-example container     docker inspect alpine-example   grep -4 Cmd   The command is also there but we don t still see the env variable value              Cmd                  sh                -c                ls  MY VAR               In fact  we could not see interpolated variables with these docker commands  While as a trade-off  we could display separately both command and env variables for a container with docker inspect     docker inspect  alpine-example    grep -4 -E  Cmd Env    That prints              Env                  MY VAR  var                PATH  usr local sbin  usr local bin  usr sbin  usr bin  sbin  bin                      Cmd                  sh                -c                ls  MY VAR              A more docker way would be to use the --format flag of docker inspect that allows to specify JSON attributes to render     docker inspect --format     Name      Config Cmd         Config Env       alpine-example   That outputs       alpine-example  sh -c ls  MY VAR    MY VAR  var PATH  usr local sbin  usr local bin  usr sbin  usr bin  sbin  bin    3  Retrieve the started process from the container itself for running containers  The entrypoint and command executed by docker may be helpful but in some cases  it is not enough because that is  only  a wrapper entrypoint script   sh  that is responsible to start the real core process  For example when I run a Nexus container  the command executed and shown to run the container is  sh -c   SONATYPE DIR  start-nexus-repository-manager sh   For PostgreSQL that is  docker-entrypoint sh postgres       To get more information  we could execute on a running container  docker exec CONTAINER ps aux  It may print other processes that may not interest us  To narrow to the initial process launched by the entrypoint  we could do    docker exec CONTAINER ps -1   I specify 1 because the process executed by the entrypoint is generally the one with the 1 id       Without ps  we could still find the information in  proc 1 cmdline  in most of Linux distros but not all   For example        docker exec CONTAINER cat  proc 1 cmdline   sed -e  s  x00   g   echo       If we have access to the docker host that started the container  another alternative to get the full command of the process executed by the entrypoint is       execute ps -PID where PID is the  local process created by the Docker daemon to run the container such as    ps -  docker container inspect --format     State Pid     CONTAINER      User-friendly formatting with docker ps   docker ps --no-trunc is not always easy to read  Specifying columns to print and in a tabular format may make it better     docker ps   --no-trunc  --format  table   Names   t   CreatedAt   t   Command      Create an alias may help     alias dps  docker ps   --no-trunc  --format  table   Names   t   CreatedAt   t   Command

User · Answer

Moving Dylan s comment into a full-blown answer because TOO USEFUL   docker run --rm -v  var run docker sock  var run docker sock assaflavie runlike YOUR-CONTAINER   What does it do  Runs https   github com lavie runlike inside a container  gets you the complete docker run command  then removes the container for you

[docker] See full command of running/stopped container in Docker

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