The /proc system in Solaris uses procfs. Think of it as any other vfs, but instead of representing data on disk, it represents the process structure of running applications. The reason you are seeing it as taking up space is because procfs contains a representation of a given processes address space,
as, and as such can be quite large.
Also, keep in mind the command you issued traverses mounted filesystems.
Finally, as the title suggested, "everything is a file." This is a fundamental Unix design principle. It is why devices, ports, virtual terminals, etc, are all accessed as files and through standard system calls like open(), for example. /proc is just extending the "everything is a file" principle to include processes for ease of access. It makes creating (and using) tools like 'pgrep', 'pkill', 'preap' (a personal fav), 'pmap', etc., easy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Sara-sh
Just wondered, if there is no real files in /proc, why does it show up as the highest space occupier on my server (this is an old Solaris 2.6):
#du -sk * |sort -rn |head
723555 proc
302662 usr
282955 opt
249259 export
209532 var
8568 tmp
5997 kernel
5019 sbin
3965 platform
2536 etc
-----Post Update-----
I would appreciate a quick response, Thanks.
06-05-2009
