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I'm interested in per-process network I/O counters, like those in /proc/net/dev and found what I thought was it under /proc/<pid>, i.e. /proc/<pid>/net/dev. But it seems that was too easy because they contain the same counters as the system.

If I diff between system and <pid> I get the same counters*. So that makes me wonder what is it supposed to represent? Or is it just a way to allow a specific process to read /proc/net/dev by setting permissions to /proc/net/<pid>/dev and not globally?

man proc does not document this and neither does http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/proc.5.html

Distro: CentOS 7.1 w/ kernel 3.10.0-229.el7.x86_64

*diff <(cat /proc/<pid>/net/dev) <(cat /proc/net/dev)

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/proc/net/dev contains statistics about network interfaces, while /proc/<pid>/net/dev contains statistics about network interfaces from the process' point of view.

I suppose that if a process runs on a network namespace (see man ip-netns) where it has access only to a limited set of interfaces, only these will show up in /proc/<pid>/net/dev.

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