Environment variables of a running process on Unix?

Question

This is to troubleshoot some problems related to environment variables ..

On Windows, I could do this by using tool such as ProcessExplorer to select particular process and view values of each environment variable. How can I accomplish the same thing on Unix? echoing and env cmd just show values at present time, but I want to view what values the running process is using currently?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

cat /proc/<pid>/environ

If you want to have pid(s) of a given running executable you can, among a number of other possibility, use pidof:

AlberT$ pidof sshd   
30690 6512

EDIT:

I totally quote @Teddy comment to achieve a more readable output:

xargs --null --max-args=1 echo < /proc/self/environ

Answer 2

Since this question has a unix tag and everyone else has done such a great job addressing linux tag, you can get this information on OS X and other BSD-derived systems using

ps -p <PID> -wwwe

or

ps -p <PID> -wwwE

and on Solaris with

/usr/ucb/ps -wwwe <PID>

Answer 3

cat /proc/PID/environ

replace PID with the PID of the process you want to see. Every information about a running process is under /proc/PID/ directory

example: cat /proc/32512/environ

Answer 4

Under Linux, I'd try having a look at

/proc/<pid>/environ

Answer 5

As others have mentioned, on Linux, you can look in /proc but there are, depending on your kernel version, one or two limits:

First of all, the environ file contains the environment as it looked when the process was spawned. That means that any changes the process might have made to its environment will not be visible in /proc:

$ cat /proc/$$/environ | wc -c
320
$ bash
$ cat /proc/$$/environ | wc -c
1270
$

The first shell is a login shell and initially has a very limited environment but grows it by sourcing e.g. .bashrc but /proc does not reflect this. The second shell inherits the larger environment from the start, which it why it shows in /proc.

Also, on older kernels, the contents of the environ file is limited to a page size (4K):

$ cat /proc/$$/environ | wc -c
4096
$ env | wc -c
10343
$

Somewhere between 2.6.9 (RHEL4) and 2.6.18 (RHEL5) this limit was removed...

Answer 6

correct usage of BSD options to do this (at least on linux):

ps e $pid

or

ps auxe  #for all processes

and yes, ps manpage is pretty confusing. (via)

Answer 7

And since my job makes me be an AIX fan boy, let us not forget:

ps eww [pid]

Or as the man page calls it, "Berkeley Standards".

For whatever reason, /proc/PID/environ does not exist in AIX.

Answer 8

For Solaris 5.10, this works:

pargs -e <PID>