Most UNIX-like systems have information about processes stored in /proc/$pid/ files, so does Linux.
If you would want to get the Resident Set Size (RSS) of a process on Linux you could find this in a number of files:
- /proc/$pid/stat
- targetted for scanf(3)
- /proc/$pid/statm
- targetted for scanf(3) but just memory information (more detailed)
- /proc/$pid/status
- targetted at humans
Oddly enough if you check these three files for the RSS memory you will get different results! It seem both stat and statm have the wrong RSS information. It is a mystery to me why.