How to get the command line args passed to a runni

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?

Answer 1

try "ps -n" in a linux terminal. this will show:

1.All processes RUNNING, their command line and their PIDs

2. The program intiate the processes.

Afterwards you will know which process to kill

Answer 2

There are several options:

ps -fp <pid>
cat /proc/<pid>/cmdline

There is more info in /proc/<pid> 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.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

On Linux, with bash, to output as quoted args so you can edit the command and rerun it

</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[@]}" &

## recover into eval string that assigns it to argv_recovered
eval_me=$(
    printf "argv_recovered=( "
    </proc/"${!}"/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
"${argv[@]}" &
pargs "${!}"
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

Answer 5

You can simply use:

ps -o args= -f -p ProcessPid

Answer 6

This will do the trick:

xargs -0 < /proc/<pid>/cmdline

Without the xargs, there will be no spaces between the arguments, because they have been converted to NULs.