One issue related to the file system overhead mentioned above is the size of a user-space application required to achieve a comparable representation of kernel internal data-structures if dedicated proc files are not used. Such user-space applications not only require storage area on a file system, but also the associated libraries must be taken into account. Comparison between a proc version of top and the usual top program are given later. Generally speaking, a kernel-module will be fairly small. Most of the proc applications built ended up being smaller than a stripped "`hello-world"' using shared libraries! So the small file system overhead of storing the module is definitely a clear advantage of this approach. Special user-space application are not required for accessing the files in proc, since there is no need to parse or format data if the content of the proc files is already prepared in a user-friendly manner. The user-space can thus be satisfied with cat and echo, which are considered to be part of the base file system.