Looking for a convenient way in C to retrieve CPU and memory usage of a process

[Matthew Seaman]

Manish Jain wrote:

> I am looking for a convenient way using C to retrieve the current CPU 
> and memory utilization of a process of which I have the pid. Can 
> somebody please give me a hint of which system-calls/library-functions 
> to use for this ? I don't want to use the system() function or grep for 
> information via the /proc filesystem.
> 
> I would be grateful if you could also please mention whether the 
> suggested method[s] is/are FreeBSD-specific or would be portable to 
> other environments like Solaris/Linux ?

Use the source, Luke.  In this cse, probably a very good place to start is
with top(1) since it already does a lot of what you want.  Start with 
/usr/src/contrib/top/

This sort of thing generally requires reading /dev/kmem, which is very OS
dependent.  The same sort of approach will probably work on most Unix-oid
OSes, but the details will be significantly different.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                   7 Priory Courtyard
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