This is the mail archive of the
cygwin
mailing list for the Cygwin project.
Re: Retrieving per-process environment block?
On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 3:00 PM, Corinna Vinschen
<corinna-cygwin@cygwin.com> wrote:
> On Nov 17 14:30, Erik Bray wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> For a quick bit of background, I'm working on porting the highly
>> useful psutil [1] Python library to Cygwin. This has proved an
>> interesting exercise, as much of the functionality of psutil works on
>> Cygwin through existing POSIX interfaces, and a handful of
>> Linux-specific interfaces as well. But there are some bits that
>> simply don't map at all.
>>
>> The one I'm struggling with right now is retrieving Cygwin environment
>> variables for a process (under inspection--i.e. not listing a
>> process's environment from within that process which is obviously
>> trivial).
>>
>> I've looked at every route I could conceive of but as far as I can
>> tell this is currently impossible. That's fine for now--I simply
>> disable that functionality in psutil. But it is unfortunate, though,
>> since the information is there.
>>
>> There are a couple avenues I could see to this. The most "obvious"
>> (to me) being to implement /proc/<pid>/environ.
>>
>> I would be willing to provide a patch for this if it would be
>> accepted. Is there some particular non-obvious hurdle to this that it
>> hasn't been implemented? Obviously there are security
>> implications--the /proc/<pid>/environ should only be readable to the
>> process's owner, but that is already within Cygwin's capabilities, and
>> works for other /proc files.
>
> Patch welcome. Implementing this should be fairly straightforward.
> The only hurdle is winsup/CONTRIBUTORS ;)
Thanks--I went to go work on this finally but it turns out not to be
straightforward after all, as the process's environment is not shared
in any way between processes.
I could do this, if each process kept a copy of its environment block
in shared memory, which would in turn have to be updated every time
the process's environment is updated. But I don't know what the
impact of that would be performance-wise.
Any advice?
Thanks,
Erik
--
Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple