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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | NOTES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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getcon(3) SELinux API documentation getcon(3)
getcon, getprevcon, getpidcon - get SELinux security context of a
process
freecon, freeconary - free memory associated with SELinux security
contexts
getpeercon - get security context of a peer socket
setcon - set current security context of a process
#include <selinux/selinux.h>
int getcon(char **context);
int getcon_raw(char **context);
int getprevcon(char **context);
int getprevcon_raw(char **context);
int getpidcon(pid_t pid, char **context);
int getpidcon_raw(pid_t pid, char **context);
int getpidprevcon(pid_t pid, char **context);
int getpidprevcon_raw(pid_t pid, char **context);
int getpeercon(int fd, char **context);
int getpeercon_raw(int fd, char **context);
void freecon(char *con);
void freeconary(char **con);
int setcon(const char *context);
int setcon_raw(const char *context);
getcon()
retrieves the context of the current process, which must be
free'd with freecon().
getprevcon()
same as getcon but gets the context before the last exec.
getpidcon()
returns the process context for the specified PID, which
must be free'd with freecon().
getpidprevcon()
returns the process context before the last exec for the
specified PID, which must be free'd with freecon().
getpeercon()
retrieves the context of the peer socket, which must be
free'd with freecon().
freecon()
frees the memory allocated for a security context.
If con is NULL, no operation is performed.
freeconary()
frees the memory allocated for a context array.
If con is NULL, no operation is performed.
setcon()
sets the current security context of the process to a new
value. Note that use of this function requires that the
entire application be trusted to maintain any desired
separation between the old and new security contexts,
unlike exec-based transitions performed via setexeccon(3).
When possible, decompose your application and use
setexeccon(3) and execve(3) instead.
Since access to file descriptors is revalidated upon use by
SELinux, the new context must be explicitly authorized in
the policy to use the descriptors opened by the old context
if that is desired. Otherwise, attempts by the process to
use any existing descriptors (including stdin, stdout, and
stderr) after performing the setcon() will fail.
A multi-threaded application can perform a setcon() prior
to creating any child threads, in which case all of the
child threads will inherit the new context. However, prior
to Linux 2.6.28, setcon() would fail if there are any other
threads running in the same process since this would yield
an inconsistency among the security contexts of threads
sharing the same memory space. Since Linux 2.6.28,
setcon() is permitted for threads within a multi-threaded
process if the new security context is bounded by the old
security context, where the bounded relation is defined
through typebounds statements in the policy and guarantees
that the new security context has a subset of the
permissions of the old security context.
If the process was being ptraced at the time of the
setcon() operation, ptrace permission will be revalidated
against the new context and the setcon() will fail if it is
not allowed by policy.
*_raw()
getcon_raw(), getprevcon_raw(), getpidcon_raw(),
getpidprevcon_raw(), getpeercon_raw() and setcon_raw()
behave identically to their non-raw counterparts but do not
perform context translation.
On error -1 is returned with errno set. On success 0 is returned.
The retrieval functions might return success and set *context to
NULL if and only if SELinux is not enabled.
Querying a foreign process via its PID, e.g. getpidcon() or
getpidprevcon(), is inherently racy and therefore should never be
relied upon for security purposes.
selinux(8), setexeccon(3)
This page is part of the selinux (Security-Enhanced Linux user-
space libraries and tools) project. Information about the project
can be found at ⟨https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/wiki⟩.
If you have a bug report for this manual page, see
⟨https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/wiki/Contributing⟩.
This page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux⟩ on 2025-08-11. (At
that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in
the repository was 2025-08-04.) If you discover any rendering
problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is
a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
man-pages@man7.org
russell@coker.com.au 21 December 2011 getcon(3)
Pages that refer to this page: avc_context_to_sid(3), getexeccon(3), getfilecon(3), getfscreatecon(3), getkeycreatecon(3), get_ordered_context_list(3), getsockcreatecon(3), matchmediacon(3), matchpathcon(3), matchpathcon_checkmatches(3), security_class_to_string(3), security_compute_av(3), selabel_lookup(3), selabel_lookup_best_match(3), selinux_lsetfilecon_default(3), selinux_set_callback(3), setfilecon(3), set_matchpathcon_flags(3), selabel_db(5), selabel_file(5), selabel_media(5), selabel_x(5)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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