changing title of a process under Solaris

princepawn has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Fact one this node would be better titled changing a process name under Solaris, but because a previous node with a similar topic used the word "title" I decided to use the same title.

Fact two on my mac os x box, the following program changes the title of the process according to ps However, the exact same program run under Solaris does not fool ps.

Question one what can I do to get a process listing under Solaris that shows the name of the process as changed by $0

Fact three I would have ended the previous sentence with a question mark, but that would look too much like some sort of Perl syntax or the other.

Fact four Here is the code in question:

my $new_name = 'terrences_process';
$0 = $new_name;

my $login = getlogin || 'tmbranno';
warn $login;

my %ps = (
          'Darwin' => [qw(ps aux)],
          'SunOS'  => [qw(ps -eaf)]
          );
my $uname = `uname`;
chomp $uname;

my $cmd = join ' ', @{$ps{$uname}}, '|', 'grep', $login , '|', 'grep',
+ $new_nam\
e;
warn $cmd;
my $ps = `$cmd`;

warn $ps;
[download]

Comment on changing title of a process under Solaris Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: changing title of a process under Solaris by traveler (Parson) on Aug 22, 2001 at 00:09 UTC
Disclaimer: I haven't used Solaris in a while. IIRC, Solaris prevents this as a security feature -- so black hats can't hide processes as easily as they otherwise might. One solution is to `exec` a new process with the new name right after you start. HTH, --traveler	[reply] [d/l]
Re: changing title of a process under Solaris by princepawn (Parson) on Aug 21, 2001 at 23:57 UTC
Update I found a Unix FAQ which says that the reason `$0` works is that some `ps` commands look at `ARGV` in the processes address space, while other `ps` commands actually check a processes u-area and this cannot be directly modified save for a system call or perhaps the `setproctitle()` utility (which explains why the earlier post said process title, not process name) However, both `/usr/ucb/ps` and `/usr/bin/pc` both fail to give me the new `$0`under Solaris... so I think I will try GNU ps... wish me luck	[reply] [d/l] [select]