Retrieving per-process environment block?

[Erik Bray <erik.m.bray@gmail.com>]

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.

Thanks,
Erik


[1] https://pythonhosted.org/psutil/

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