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This makes me think, it would be nice if there was an easy built-in way to expose information about a process using the filesystem. Something like "cat /proc/$pid/fs/current_track" to get a name of a current song from a music player, or "ls /proc/$pid/fs/tabs" to list open tabs in my browser (and maybe use this to grab the html or embedded images).

I mean right now it's possible to do this using FUSE, but that's convoluted and nobody does it.




Can you actually write to the /proc directory? Working with libfuse I've had much of the same ideas, basically allow programs to expose information as files. The beauty of the fuse system is also that you only have to respond to requests when they happen. So you don't have to actually create all these files until someone asks for them. Another idea I've had is to expose the configuration of a program through a filesystem. Instead of having a config file and a refresh command or a complicated IPC you could simply write to files to change the config.




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