How to get environment variables from a running process in Linux

In Linux, everything is a file. Even running processes are represented as files. You will find all the running processes in /proc/, with a separate directory for each process id.

ps aux | grep [process name]  # to get the process ID
cat /proc/[process ID]/environ | tr '\0' '\n'

What the above commands do, is:

  • Get the id of a process by name
  • print the contents of the “environ” file for that process
  • print each environment variable on a new line; tr stands for “translate”

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