How To See A Process’s Environment in Linux

One of our sysadmins recently taught me that we can see the environment with which a process is launched by looking in /proc. Whoa! That’s helpful.

Unfortunately, the environment file is null terminated so not pleasant to read or pipe together with other commands. So here’s a handy one-liner to print them “properly” for easier inspection or command chaining.

cat /proc/{pid}/environ | xargs --null --max-args=1 echo

#protip #selfreference