Is it safe to parse a /proc/ file?

Question

I want to parse /proc/net/tcp/, but is it safe?

How should I open and read files from /proc/ and not be afraid, that some other process (o

Answer 1

I have the source for Linux 2.6.27.8 handy since I'm doing driver development at the moment on an embedded ARM target.

The file ...linux-2.6.27.8-lpc32xx/net/ipv4/raw.c at line 934 contains, for example

    seq_printf(seq, "%4d: %08X:%04X %08X:%04X"
            " %02X %08X:%08X %02X:%08lX %08X %5d %8d %lu %d %p %d\n",
            i, src, srcp, dest, destp, sp->sk_state,
            atomic_read(&sp->sk_wmem_alloc),
            atomic_read(&sp->sk_rmem_alloc),
            0, 0L, 0, sock_i_uid(sp), 0, sock_i_ino(sp),
            atomic_read(&sp->sk_refcnt), sp, atomic_read(&sp->sk_drops));

which outputs

[wally@zenetfedora ~]$ cat /proc/net/tcp
  sl  local_address rem_address   st tx_queue rx_queue tr tm->when retrnsmt   uid  timeout inode                                                     
   0: 017AA8C0:0035 00000000:0000 0A 00000000:00000000 00:00000000 00000000     0        0 15160 1 f552de00 299
   1: 00000000:C775 00000000:0000 0A 00000000:00000000 00:00000000 00000000     0        0 13237 1 f552ca00 299
...

in function raw_sock_seq_show() which is part of a hierarchy of procfs handling functions. The text is not generated until a read() request is made of the /proc/net/tcp file, a reasonable mechanism since procfs reads are surely much less common than updating the information.

Some drivers (such as mine) implement the proc_read function with a single sprintf(). The extra complication in the core drivers implementation is to handle potentially very long output which may not fit in the intermediate, kernel-space buffer during a single read.

I tested that with a program using a 64K read buffer but it results in a kernel space buffer of 3072 bytes in my system for proc_read to return data. Multiple calls with advancing pointers are needed to get more than that much text returned. I don't know what the right way to make the returned data consistent when more than one i/o is needed. Certainly each entry in /proc/net/tcp is self-consistent. There is some likelihood that lines side-by-side are snapshot at different times.