Reading living process memory without interrupting it

Question

I would like to explore the memory of a living process, and when I do so, the process must not get disturbed - so attaching gdb to the process (which would stop it) is not a

Answer 1

If you have root access and are on a linux system, you can use the following linux script (adapted from Gilles' excellent unix.stackexchange.com answer and the answer originally given in the question above but including SyntaxErrors and not being pythonic):

#!/usr/bin/env python

import re
import sys

def print_memory_of_pid(pid, only_writable=True):
    """ 
    Run as root, take an integer PID and return the contents of memory to STDOUT
    """
    memory_permissions = 'rw' if only_writable else 'r-'
    sys.stderr.write("PID = %d" % pid)
    with open("/proc/%d/maps" % pid, 'r') as maps_file:
        with open("/proc/%d/mem" % pid, 'r', 0) as mem_file:
            for line in maps_file.readlines():  # for each mapped region
                m = re.match(r'([0-9A-Fa-f]+)-([0-9A-Fa-f]+) ([-r][-w])', line)
                if m.group(3) == memory_permissions: 
                    sys.stderr.write("\nOK : \n" + line+"\n")
                    start = int(m.group(1), 16)
                    if start > 0xFFFFFFFFFFFF:
                        continue
                    end = int(m.group(2), 16)
                    sys.stderr.write( "start = " + str(start) + "\n")
                    mem_file.seek(start)  # seek to region start
                    chunk = mem_file.read(end - start)  # read region contents
                    print chunk,  # dump contents to standard output
                else:
                    sys.stderr.write("\nPASS : \n" + line+"\n")

if __name__ == '__main__': # Execute this code when run from the commandline.
    try:
        assert len(sys.argv) == 2, "Provide exactly 1 PID (process ID)"
        pid = int(sys.argv[1])
        print_memory_of_pid(pid)
    except (AssertionError, ValueError) as e:
        print "Please provide 1 PID as a commandline argument."
        print "You entered: %s" % ' '.join(sys.argv)
        raise e

If you save this as write_mem.py, you can run this (with python2.6 or 2.7) or early in python2.5 (if you add from __future__ import with_statement) as:

sudo python write_mem.py 1234 > pid1234_memory_dump

to dump pid1234 memory to the file pid1234_memory_dump.