How to get whole command line from a process?

Question

How can I get the command arguments or the whole command line from a running process using its process name?

For example this process:

# ps
PID   USER     TIME   COMMAND
 1452 root       0:00 /sbin/udhcpc -b -T 1 -A 12 -i eth0 -p /var/run/udhcpc.eth0.pid

And what I want is /sbin/udhcpc -b -T 1 -A 12 -i eth0 -p /var/run/udhcpc.eth0.pid or the arguments. I know the process name and want its arguments. I'm using Busybox on SliTaz.

Do you want to process the output from ps (not recommended) or are you looking for some alternative command to ps that will give you the output? What needs to be done when ps gives multiple lines of output? print all/first/last? — Anthon, Oct 20 '14 at 12:47
I edited my question. I know the process name and want its arguments. I'm using SliTaz (minimalistic linux) with Busybox. — Michael, Oct 20 '14 at 12:58
@Michael Have you tried arg like command as per @John answer? — Pandya, Oct 20 '14 at 13:03
Yes but how to write it to a variable? I think of two command: PID=pidof <process name> ps -o pid,args|grep $PID|tr -s " "|cut -d " " -f 2 But this way I don't get the args in one variable — Michael, Oct 20 '14 at 13:06
@Michael I edited my answer accordingly. You should be more specific about your needs when writing your question ;) — John WH Smith, Oct 20 '14 at 13:10
Sorry, my fault. I don't have -p option using Busybox. Any further advices? — Michael, Oct 20 '14 at 13:13

John WH Smith · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-20T13:15:21.910

146

You could use the -o switch to specify your output format:

$ ps -eo args

From the man page:

Command with all its arguments as a string. Modifications to the arguments may be shown. [...]

You may also use the -p switch to select a specific PID:

$ ps -p [PID] -o args

pidof may also be used to switch from process name to PID, hence allowing the use of -p with a name:

$ ps -p $(pidof dhcpcd) -o args

Of course, you may also use grep for this (in which case, you must add the -e switch):

$ ps -eo args | grep dhcpcd | head -n -1

GNU ps will also allow you to remove the headers (of course, this is unnecessary when using grep):

$ ps -p $(pidof dhcpcd) -o args --no-headers

On other systems, you may pipe to AWK or sed:

$ ps -p $(pidof dhcpcd) -o args | awk 'NR > 1'
$ ps -p $(pidof dhcpcd) -o args | sed 1d

Edit: if you want to catch this line into a variable, just use $(...) as usual:

$ CMDLINE=$(ps -p $(pidof dhcpcd) -o args --no-headers)

or, with grep :

$ CMDLINE=$(ps -eo args | grep dhcpcd | head -n -1)

edited Oct 20 '14 at 13:15

answered Oct 20 '14 at 12:47

John WH Smith

15,880

1

@Michael replace args with command (or cmd). – Pandya Oct 20 '14 at 13:00
1

@Pandya Both cmd and command are aliases to args, this is probably unnecessary. – John WH Smith Oct 20 '14 at 13:05
1

I don't have a -p option using Busybox: Usage: ps [-o COL1,COL2=HEADER] [-T] – Michael Oct 20 '14 at 13:11
You may use grep to catch the line you're actually interested in: ps -eo args | grep dhcpcd | head -n -1. I edited my answer. – John WH Smith Oct 20 '14 at 13:13
Oh, this looks good: ps -o args | grep | head -n 1 – Michael Oct 20 '14 at 13:17
1

The command line appears to be truncated at 4096 bytes in the middle of an argvalue. According to https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/91561/ps-full-command-is-too-long this is a problem with older kernels. – Joachim Wagner Dec 03 '18 at 17:32

slm · Answer 2 · 2018-03-13T12:27:47.017

Method #1 - Using ps

You could use ps -eaf | grep 1234.

Example

$ ps -eaf | grep 28865
saml     28865  9661  0 03:06 pts/2    00:00:00 bash -c sleep 10000; while [ 1 ];do echo hi;sleep 10;done
saml     28866 28865  0 03:06 pts/2    00:00:00 sleep 10000

NOTE: Busybox's ps doesn't include the -eaf switches as shown above from a typical ps that's included with most Linuxes, however Busybox's ps shows what looks to be very similar output to the example I provided. You can install Busybox on most Linuxes and run it like so:

$ busybox ps
  852 root       0:00 /sbin/auditd -n
  855 root       0:01 /sbin/audispd
  857 root       0:00 /usr/sbin/sedispatch
  866 root       0:00 /usr/sbin/alsactl -s -n 19 -c -E ALSA_CONFIG_PATH=/etc/alsa/alsactl.conf --initfile=/lib/alsa/init/00main rdaemon
  867 root       0:00 /usr/libexec/bluetooth/bluetoothd
  869 root       0:01 {firewalld} /usr/bin/python -Es /usr/sbin/firewalld --nofork --nopid
  871 root       0:32 /usr/libexec/accounts-daemon
  873 rtkit      0:05 /usr/libexec/rtkit-daemon
  875 root       0:00 /usr/sbin/ModemManager
  876 avahi      0:03 avahi-daemon: running [dufresne.local]
  878 root       0:54 /usr/sbin/irqbalance --foreground
  884 root       0:00 /usr/sbin/smartd -n -q never
  886 avahi      0:00 avahi-daemon: chroot helper
  891 chrony     0:01 /usr/sbin/chronyd
  892 root       0:01 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-logind
  893 dbus       1:28 /bin/dbus-daemon --system --address=systemd: --nofork --nopidfile --systemd-activation

Method #2 - Using /proc

You can also look at the cmdline file that each PID has under /proc/<pid>.

$ cat /proc/28865/cmdline 
bash-csleep 10000; while [ 1 ];do echo hi;sleep 10;done

But notice that it's missing the spacing. This is due to a NUL character being used within this file to separate your command line arguments. Not to worry though, these can be stripped out.

$ tr '\0' ' ' </proc/28865/cmdline
bash -c sleep 10000; while [ 1 ];do echo hi;sleep 10;done

References

How can I see the exact command line being executed inside some bash instance?

The /proc/*/cmdline method is very useful when ps command not available. — allenyllee, Aug 17 '21 at 11:36
I tried this and did hexdump -C /proc/123/cmdline before I read to the end of the post about tr, so I guess that's another way. I have ps but none of the described arguments worked for me. — Keeely, Nov 23 '21 at 23:51
Thanks for including info on the NUL character being used for spaces in the /proc/ output, I was confused how exactly ps and these other tools were getting the command line with spaces in the right places. — dcom-launch, Jan 04 '22 at 14:40

score 18 · Answer 3 · 2014-10-20T13:08:43.810

18

Try something like this:

(example output from busybox on OpenWrt on one of my routers)

root@ap8:~# xargs -0 printf '%s\n' </proc/991/cmdline
/usr/sbin/uhttpd
-f
-h
/www
-r
ap8
-x
/cgi-bin
-u
/ubus
-t
60
-T
30
-k
20
-A
1
-n
3
-N
100
-R
-p
0.0.0.0:80
-p
[::]:80

/proc/$PID/cmdline contains the arguments of process $PID like a C-ish strings one after another. Each string is zero terminated.

Quotes arround some arguments or options are shell stuff. You have to look closer at the lines being shown and where spaces or other characters with special meaning for the shell are used. You will need to quote that character(s) somehow or the complete argument when joining these lines to a command line again.

edited Oct 20 '14 at 13:08

answered Oct 20 '14 at 13:01

1

tr "\0" " " </proc/991/cmdline – Cyrus Oct 20 '14 at 13:20
@Cyrus: You cannot distinguish args containg spaces from adjacent separate args then. By replacing the zero byte with a space you destroy information. – Oct 20 '14 at 13:32
1

I do agree replacing \0 with to be bad, but I think tr '\0' '\n' < /proc/$foo/cmdline to be a bit simpler than xargs. – phemmer Oct 20 '14 at 14:00
printf makes it easier to add quotes to the output, insert a space instead of the new line and so on. When thinking of adding more processing, the way over printf is a good start. – Oct 20 '14 at 14:21
This is the best answer for distributions such as Alpine. – ivan Aug 13 '20 at 08:58

score 17 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 09 '17 at 07:13

Knowing the PID, just exec

cat /proc/pid/cmdline

For instance, for PID = 127

# cat /proc/127/cmdline ; echo ""
/usr/lib/jvm/jdk-8-oracle-x64//bin/java-Djava.util.logging.config.file=/opt/tomcat/conf/logging.properties-Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager-Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni-javaagent:/jmxtrans-agent-1.2.2.jar=/opt/tomcat/conf/jmxtrans-agent.xml-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=5000-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false-Djava.endorsed.dirs=/opt/tomcat/endorsed-classpath/opt/tomcat/bin/bootstrap.jar:/opt/tomcat/bin/tomcat-juli.jar-Dcatalina.base=/opt/tomcat-Dcatalina.home=/opt/tomcat-Djava.io.tmpdir=/opt/tomcat/temporg.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrapstart
#

Thank you! This is the only answer, which displays the whole length of a very large command. — Sim, Feb 27 '20 at 09:11

score 3 · Answer 5 · answered Jan 09 '20 at 14:30

3

If you like short commands and pgrep is available, I would suggest pgrep -fl <process_name>.

ps -o args is truncated

answered Jan 09 '20 at 14:30

Mickael Cagnion

39

score 1 · Answer 6 · answered May 10 '22 at 08:14

1

pgrep -a <name>

In your example :

pgrep -a udhcpc

pgrep does not truncate line, but ps does.

For those that insist on using ps, then do that to avoid truncation :

ps <processID> | tee

answered May 10 '22 at 08:14

Jérôme Radix

250

glenn jackman · Answer 7 · 2021-07-15T15:21:34.640

Coming late to the party: extracting the strings from /proc/$pid/cmdline, and displaying them with proper shell quoting.

This requires bash version 4.4+ (but possibly v5.1 for some bug fixes noted in the CHANGES file)

mapfile -d '' -t cmd < /proc/$pid/cmdline
echo "${cmd[@]@Q}"

mapfile reads the lines of a file into an array
the -d '' option uses null instead of newline as the line terminator
@Q transformation emits each element of the array with shell quoting

Demo:

$ sh -c "echo 'hello world'; sleep 5m" &
[1] 14844
hello world
$ pid=$!
$ mapfile -d '' -t cmd < /proc/$pid/cmdline
$ declare -p cmd
declare -a cmd=([0]="sh" [1]="-c" [2]="echo 'hello world'; sleep 5m")
$ echo "${cmd[@]@Q}"
'sh' '-c' 'echo '\''hello world'\''; sleep 5m'

How to get whole command line from a process?

7 Answers7

Method #1 - Using ps

Example

Method #2 - Using /proc

References

Linked

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