The proc filesystem is an important feature of Linux that you can't ignore. proc is a pseudo or virtual filesystem that provides an interface to kernel data structures. In other words, proc isn't an actual filesystem in the real-world sense; rather, it resides only in memory and not on a disk. It is automatically mounted by the system.

Most of its contents are regular files and directories, so you can use most regular Linux tools to navigate the proc filesystem. The examples in this article should run the same on any Linux distribution.