How do I get the full path for a process on OS X?

Question

I know that I can get the PID for a process by using ps, but how to a find the full path of that process?

Answer 1

OS X has the libproc library, which can be used to gather different process informations. In order to find the absolute path for a given PID, the following code can be used:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <libproc.h>

int main (int argc, char* argv[])
{
    pid_t pid; int ret;
    char pathbuf[PROC_PIDPATHINFO_MAXSIZE];

    if ( argc > 1 ) {
        pid = (pid_t) atoi(argv[1]);
        ret = proc_pidpath (pid, pathbuf, sizeof(pathbuf));
        if ( ret <= 0 ) {
            fprintf(stderr, "PID %d: proc_pidpath ();\n", pid);
            fprintf(stderr, "    %s\n", strerror(errno));
        } else {
            printf("proc %d: %s\n", pid, pathbuf);
        }
    }

    return 0;
}

Example to compile and run (above code is stored in pathfind.c, 32291 is the pid of the process I'm trying to find path info for):

$ cc pathfind.c -o pathfind
$ ./pathfind 32291
proc 32291: /some/path/your-binary-app

Refer to this blog post: http://astojanov.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/mac-os-x-resolve-absolute-path-using-process-pid/

Answer 2

One solution can be using which:

which `ps -o comm= -p $PID`

Where $PID is pid of process you want to check. Tested on OS X 10.8.2.

Answer 3

All the answers involving ps are insufficient, because the ps command on MacOS can only show the full path of an executable if it was launched using its full path. If the process was launched using a relative path or just the filename that was then looked up in PATH, the ps command will not show the full path.

The lsof command can be used to display full path names of running processes on MacOS regardless how they were launched, as follows:

lsof -d txt

The last column of the output shows the full path of each executable.

If you wanted to see just the full path of a specific process with PID 123:

lsof -a -d txt -p 123

The -a parameter is important in this case, to force an "AND" matching of the specified criteria.

If you wanted to see the full path by process name, you can use this:

lsof -a -d txt -c python

This will give you the full path of all running processes whose executable name starts with "python". This means you might also get "python2" and "python3" processes in this list, which is often what you want.

However, if you wanted an exact match on process name, the -c command also supports regular expressions, so you could use an anchored regex like this:

lsof -a -d txt -c /^python$/

This will give you only processes named python and nothing else.

One final wrinkle is that Apple sometimes likes to capitalize the names of executables that come bundled with MacOS.

For example, the Python executable bundled with MacOS is actually named Python (with a capital P), even if you launched it from the command line as python (lowercase P).

To cope with this, the -c argument also allows case-insensitive matching by appending the i flag after the regex, as follows:

lsof -a -d txt -c /^python$/i

This will give you the full paths of all running processes named python or Python, regardless of case.

Answer 4

A more portable and modern version of @tomis's answer:

command -v "$(ps -o comm= -p $PID)"

command -v replaces which and is more portable.

Backticks are replaced by $(cmds)

And another alternative that depends on realpath from the GNU CoreUtils:

realpath /proc/$PID/exe

Answer 5

Try this:

sudo ls -l /proc/$(ps -e | grep $PROCESS_NAME | awk '{print $1}')/exe

where $PROCESS_NAME is name of process you want to check.