After I sent my reply above, I went off and did a rather involved exploration of /proc and ps that I was going to post here. But, as a result of that work, and a discussion of it with a colleague, I came to the conclusion that using any external means of determining a process' own start up command is potentially inaccurate and a potential security breach.

How?

Well, you can lie to exec about what $0 is in the first place (see http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/exec.html and search for lie). And the lie will be propagated in /proc and ps, so using those are no better than using $0. Additionally, I would imagine that mucking around with your environment (especially $ENV{PATH}) before calling exec on a naked perl command could be the potential security hazard.

I am convinced that the safest way for a Perl program to re-invoke yourself is to build the command as follows:

• Use $^X in place of the perl command you might determine externally.
• Use Devel::PL_origargv for arguments/options to Perl itself.
• Use $0 for the script name (although this can be fraught with peril, as noted above).
• Use a copy of @ARGV before any getopt processing.
• Put all of these in an array and use the exec(@array) form, not the exec("@array") string form.

Still sounds like an operation worth of a module. Potential names anyone? Reinvoke? Groundhog ? :-)

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