getppid¶

Intro¶

getppid - return the process ID of the parent of the calling process

Description¶

The getppid() system call is used to determine the PID of the parent of the calling process. This is an important information for parent-child process relationships, as the PPID value for the parent of the process can be used to separate process hierarchies. The return value is a positive number, or zero if the parent process does not exist.

There are some edge cases and drawbacks to using getppid(). For example, a process can check its parent process ID with getppid() but this value is not guaranteed to stay the same over the course of execution. Furthermore, if the parent process has exited, then getppid will return zero, which is not very helpful.

Arguments¶

No arguments

Hooks¶

sys_getppid¶

Type¶

kprobe

Purpose¶

To trace all calls to getppid() in the kernel.

Example Use Case¶

By generating trace events at each sys_getppid occurrence, one can get all of the process IDs in the parent-child process tree and maintain a timeline of process creation and exits.

Issues¶

If the parent of a process exits and is replaced with a different process of the same PID, then getppid would return the same value, leading to potential confusion.

execve - checks whether the current process is the parent of a given process
fork - creates a new process that is the parent of the calling process

This document was automatically generated by OpenAI and needs review. It might not be accurate and might contain errors. The authors of Tracee recommend that the user reads the "events.go" source file to understand the events and their arguments better.