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by hans_castorp 697 days ago
> I'd look in the /proc/[pid]/ filesystem for visibility into what processes are exhausting the PID space.

From the source code:

    # so initially i was hoping you could get everything from /proc/<pid>/status
    # because it's easy to parse (in most cases) but apparently you can't get
    # things like the cpu% :(
2 comments
iefbr14 697 days ago
You can calculate a cpu% from the tick information (uticks,kticks,sticks) in /proc/[pid]/stat. I've done it once in a script after spending considerable time reading the manual of proc.
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Arch-TK 697 days ago
Specifically the issue here was that it's littered between `/proc/<pid>/stat{,us}` and then for some of the information you have to look in `/proc` itself for things like major number - driver mapping (for figuring out which TTY something is running on).

Realistically you can get a useful `ps` by catting/grepping `/proc/<pid>/status` for all the processes, but the goal here was to replicate exactly the output of procps `ps aux`. Except for the bugs in column alignment, she fixed those intentionally.

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