Parsing enviroment variables of a process at a BSD-like operating system

[Stephan Haller]

Hi Devs,

I know you as being sensitive that all Xfce related applications are
running well also at BSD-like operating systems. That's why I ask you
for help.

I'm the author of xfdashboard. I just implemented an application tracker
which tries to determine which applications are running and marking the
corresponding icon in the favourites.

To archive it xfdashboard listens to newly opened windows, gets its
process id and parses the enviroment variable set of the process
at /proc/<<PID>>/environ. If it contains all needed environment
variables and if their values are valid, then an application is
considered to be running and marked. It is ok that this
file /proc/<<PID>>/environ only contains the environment variables and
name at the time the process was spawned. I do not need to know if they
changed in the meantime.

I know BSD is working a different way but I have no idea at all how BSD
is working in real. So how can get this enviroment variable set under
BSD? I really would like to use the algorithm at BSD as well because it
is the best way I found.

I hope you can help me.

Regards,
Stephan