Getting System and Process Information Using C Programming and Shell in Linux

Whenever you start a new process in Linux it creates a file in /proc/ folder with the same name as that of the process id of the process. In that folder, there is a file named “status” which has all the details of the process. We can get those Process Information Through shell as follows:

cat /proc/1/status

As can be seen, it displays most of the information about the process.

Note:, In this case, the process id is 1, it may be changed as per need.

You can get the System Information through the shell. The basic system information is stored in a file named os-release in /etc/ folder.

cat /etc/os-release

You can also get the System Information using C programming. The below code is used to get the details of the system. In this code, utsname maintains a structure that has the details of the system like sysname nodename, release, version, etc.

#include<stdio.h>
#include<stdlib.h>
#include<errno.h>
#include<sys/utsname.h>
int main()
{
   struct utsname buf1;
   errno =0;
   if(uname(&buf1)!=0)
   {
      perror("uname doesn't return 0, so there is an error");
      exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
   }
   printf("System Name = %s\n", buf1.sysname);
   printf("Node Name = %s\n", buf1.nodename);
   printf("Version = %s\n", buf1.version);
   printf("Release = %s\n", buf1.release);
   printf("Machine = %s\n", buf1.machine);
}

On execution the above code will give the following output:

To get Process Information using C programming, use the below code. In this code, we execute the Linux command through a c program to get the details of the process.

#include<stdio.h>
#include<stdlib.h>
int main()
{
   int r=system("cat /proc/1/status");
}

On execution the above code will give the following output: