Linux Administration Cookbook

/proc

Again, you're probably sick of reading about /proc, but here's a real-world example of how useful it can be.

VMs suck for entropy, so it's usually a good idea to work out how much random data you can generate on your system. You can find that a lack of entropy can severely hamper processes that need to do things such as encrypt files.

Using /proc, we can determine the entropy that's currently available to our system:

$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail 874

This is one great example of how useful /proc can be. But what else is it useful for?

We could use /proc to quickly count up the number of CPU cores our machine has:

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "core id"core id : 0

We only have one CPU core in our machine. How about network ...