Well, if you use the script in ztk-visual-top-w-kill, and go into the thread where I sysread top's output. and print the $buf, 
  sysread(READ,$buf,8192);  
   print "$buf\n\n";

[download]
you will see that top's batch output is setting the name to 3 (at least on my machine for /home/zentara/bin/claws), when it's still a string, before any split occurs.

So the question is whether it is top's -b option that does this, or does the IPC::Open3 pipe somehow change it?

When top is run in normal mode(like in an xterm), the name is shown correctly.

Also if I do "top -b >>top.output", the name is shown correctly as "claws". So somehow, coming thru the IPC::OPen3 pipe is causing it to change. Is it possible that a pipe is interpreted to be a weird terminal type (not vt100)?

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. Cogito ergo sum a bum

In reply to Re^2: unexplained output from top in batch mode by zentara
in thread unexplained output from top in batch mode by zentara

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