It has been quite a while since I have written my last article. After pondering what to write for a couple of days, I have decided to share a couple of /proc filesystem tricks. Here is a list of real-life scenarios that illustrate how you can exploit this filesystem: Environment Variables Let's start with a simple example. You have a Java process that is misbehaving and you would like to make sure that the JAVA_HOME environment variable for the process context is pointing to the correct JDK installed on the system. Just cat the /proc/[pid]/environ file to view the list of environment variables for the process. File Descriptors To get the list of file descriptors opened by a process run an ls command for /proc/[pid]/fd. This directory would list the file descriptors as symbolic links to files or sockets with inode numbers. This is a particularly useful trick in case you are dealing with a long strace output and you have a system call with an associated file descriptor. If t...