Dump a linux process's memory to file

Question

Is it possible to dump the current memory allocated for a process (by PID) to a file? Or read it somehow?

Answer 1

I'm not sure how you dump all the memory to a file without doing this repeatedly (if anyone knows an automated way to get gdb to do this please let me know), but the following works for any one batch of memory assuming you know the pid:

cat /proc/[pid]/maps
This will be in the format (example):
00400000-00421000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 592398 /usr/libexec/dovecot/pop3-login 00621000-00622000 rw-p 00021000 08:01 592398 /usr/libexec/dovecot/pop3-login 00622000-0066a000 rw-p 00622000 00:00 0 [heap] 3e73200000-3e7321c000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 229378 /lib64/ld-2.5.so 3e7341b000-3e7341c000 r--p 0001b000 08:01 229378 /lib64/ld-2.5.so

Pick one batch of memory (so for example 00621000-00622000) then use gdb to attach to the process and dump that memory:
gdb --pid [pid]
(gdb) dump memory /root/output 0x00621000 0x00622000
Then analyse /root/output with the strings command, less you want the PuTTY all over your screen :)

Answer 2

I've made a script that accomplishes this task.

The idea commes from James Lawrie's answer and this post: http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/programming-scripting/52375-reading-memory-other-processes.html#post287195

#!/bin/bash

grep rw-p /proc/$1/maps | sed -n 's/^\([0-9a-f]*\)-\([0-9a-f]*\) .*$/\1 \2/p' | while read start stop; do gdb --batch --pid $1 -ex "dump memory $1-$start-$stop.dump 0x$start 0x$stop"; done

put this in a file (eg. "dump-all-memory-of-pid.sh") and make it executable

usage: ./dump-all-memory-of-pid.sh [pid]

The output is printed to files with the names: pid-startaddress-stopaddress.dump

Dependencies: gdb

Answer 3

man proc says :

/proc/[pid]/mem This file can be used to access the pages of a process's memory through open(2), read(2), and lseek(2).

Maybe it can help you

Answer 4

try

    gcore pid

where pid is the actual number of the pid; for more info see: info gcore

may take some time for the dump happens, and some memory may not be readable, but is good enough... be aware also that it can create big files, I just created a 2GB file that way..

Answer 5

Tool to dump process to standard output, pcat/memdump:

• http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/gutsy/man1/pcat.1.html
• http://www.porcupine.org/forensics/tct.html