How do I get the path of a process in Unix / Linux

Question

In Windows environment there is an API to obtain the path which is running a process. Is there something similar in Unix / Linux?

Or is there some other way to do th

Answer 1

I use:

ps -ef | grep 786

Replace 786 with your PID or process name.

Answer 2

You can find the exe easily by these ways, just try it yourself.

• ll /proc/<PID>/exe
• pwdx <PID>
• lsof -p <PID> | grep cwd

Answer 3

pwdx <process id>

This command will fetch the process path from where it is executing.

Answer 4

Find the path to a process name

#!/bin/bash
# @author Lukas Gottschall
PID=`ps aux | grep precessname | grep -v grep | awk '{ print $2 }'`
PATH=`ls -ald --color=never /proc/$PID/exe | awk '{ print $10 }'`
echo $PATH

Answer 5

thanks : Kiwy
with AIX:

getPathByPid()
{
    if [[ -e /proc/$1/object/a.out ]]; then
        inode=`ls -i /proc/$1/object/a.out 2>/dev/null | awk '{print $1}'`
        if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
            strnode=${inode}"$"
            strNum=`ls -li /proc/$1/object/ 2>/dev/null | grep $strnode | awk '{print $NF}' | grep "[0-9]\{1,\}\.[0-9]\{1,\}\."`
            if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
                # jfs2.10.6.5869
                n1=`echo $strNum|awk -F"." '{print $2}'`
                n2=`echo $strNum|awk -F"." '{print $3}'`
                # brw-rw----    1 root     system       10,  6 Aug 23 2013  hd9var
                strexp="^b.*"$n1,"[[:space:]]\{1,\}"$n2"[[:space:]]\{1,\}.*$"   # "^b.*10, \{1,\}5 \{1,\}.*$"
                strdf=`ls -l /dev/ | grep $strexp | awk '{print $NF}'`
                if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
                    strMpath=`df | grep $strdf | awk '{print $NF}'`
                    if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
                        find $strMpath -inum $inode 2>/dev/null
                        if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
                            return 0
                        fi
                    fi
                fi
            fi
        fi
    fi
    return 1
}

Answer 6

In Linux every process has its own folder in /proc. So you could use getpid() to get the pid of the running process and then join it with the path /proc to get the folder you hopefully need.

Here's a short example in Python:

import os
print os.path.join('/proc', str(os.getpid()))

Here's the example in ANSI C as well:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/types.h>


int
main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    pid_t pid = getpid();

    fprintf(stdout, "Path to current process: '/proc/%d/'\n", (int)pid);

    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

Compile it with:

gcc -Wall -Werror -g -ansi -pedantic process_path.c -oprocess_path