How to get the command line args passed to a running process on unix/linux systems?

On SunOS there is pargs command that prints the command line arguments passed to the running process.

Is there is any similar command on other Unix environments?


There are several options:

ps -fp <pid>
cat /proc/<pid>/cmdline | sed -e "s/\x00/ /g"; echo

There is more info in /proc/<pid> on Linux, just have a look.

On other Unixes things might be different. The ps command will work everywhere, the /proc stuff is OS specific. For example on AIX there is no cmdline in /proc.


This will do the trick:

xargs -0 < /proc/<pid>/cmdline

Without the xargs, there will be no spaces between the arguments, because they have been converted to NULs.


Full commandline

For Linux & Unix System you can use ps -ef | grep process_name to get the full command line.

On SunOS systems, if you want to get full command line, you can use

/usr/ucb/ps -auxww | grep -i process_name

To get the full command line you need to become super user.

List of arguments

pargs -a PROCESS_ID

will give a detailed list of arguments passed to a process. It will output the array of arguments in like this:

argv[o]: first argument
argv[1]: second..
argv[*]: and so on..

I didn't find any similar command for Linux, but I would use the following command to get similar output:

tr '\0' '\n' < /proc/<pid>/environ