Re: Reflection and /proc

["Albert D. Cahalan" <acahalan@cs.uml.edu>]

Davide Bolcioni writes:

> - content would vary from /proc/$$/stat, parsable with scanf(), to
> /proc/$$/status, which has some human-readable English spread over
> multiple lines;
...
> The bad solution is nationalized /proc, I gather, so I guess /proc is
> intended for scripts and possibly for C programs: /proc/$$/stat is
> "right" (scanf one-liner), while /proc/$$/status less so (multi-line
> with English). Is this what you mean ?

I am one of the procps hackers. I recently rewrote large parts
of the collection, including all of "ps" and "skill".

The /proc/$$/stat file format is OK. (binary is better)
The worst problem I have seen was signal info in hex.
I think hex is great, but one can't just switch to it.

The /proc/$$/status file format is bad. Besides being slow,
it is unreliable. People are tempted to change the spelling!
I had to send in a patch to revert some 2.1.xx changes.

My ideal format would be an array of 64-bit values.
Data that takes a long time to collect should be separate.
Data should also be grouped by security requirements.

The latest procps code:
http://www.cs.uml.edu/~acahalan/linux/procps-990224.tar.gz
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