Understanding the /proc/cpuinfo File in Linux

In Linux, “/proc” is a special virtual file system that contains valuable system-related information in different files. Such a file is “/proc/cpuinfo“, which stores detailed information about the CPU, such as vendor ID, CPU family, model name, virtualization features, caches, and many more.

Since it’s a read-only file, you can’t modify it, but you can use the “cat” or “bat” command to view its contents.

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo

Output:

This file provides much more CPU information compared to other built-in or external tools. If you are familiar with specific fields in this file, you can use other tools such as “grep” or “cut” to extract information from that field, which you can then use in a command or shell script.

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For example, the file mentions the CPU model name multiple times, which I want to extract. The condition is that the output should contain only one occurence, disregarding all others. For this purpose, you can use the following command:

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "model name" | uniq

The above command will search for the “model name” field using the “grep” command and then retain only one occurrence using “uniq” command.

Alternatively, if you only want to output the “model name” value without the field name, you can use the “cut” command for that purpose.

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "model name" | uniq | cut -d " " -f 3-

The command above will function almost identically to the previous one, except it will output only the third and subsequent fields, omitting the previous two.

This way, you can use the information from “/proc/cpuinfo” in a command or shell script. Now, most of the fields are named in a manner that allows anyone to readily identify and understand the value they represent, except for the flags.

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Flags in the /proc/cpuinfo File

The “flags” field in the “/proc/cpuinfo” file contains various flags that define the number of processors attribute. So, let’s see some of the most important flags and understand what information they provide.

The above are a few of the many flags. For a comprehensive list of all flags, along with links for further understanding, refer to this Stack Exchange answer.

Final Word

This article has come to an end. I hope you learned and understood more about the “/etc/cpuinfo” file in this article. If you have any questions or queries about the topic, please leave a comment.

Till then, peace!