Re: Feature request: process title with exec -a "" for oneself

[Chet Ramey]

On 8/31/24 10:43 PM, Lockywolf wrote:
> Dear Bash developers,
>
> May I ask for a small feature to be added to bash?
>
> At the moment exec changes IO redirections for the newly started
> processes, but if there is no command for exec'ing, it changes those
> redirections for the bash process itself.
>
> The exec -a, however, allows setting the current process title (argv0)
> only for the newly exec'ed processes, and "exec -a whatever" (without a
> command) does nothing.
>
> However it seems to be possible (albeit in a series of 8 syscalls) to
> change the _current_ process' cmdline and argv0:

Currently, the shell's argc/argv are exposed to the user as

$1...$n - the positional parameters (argv[1]...argv[argc])
$# - the number of positional parameters (argc)
$0 - argv[0]

You can change the positional parameters and $# using the `set' builtin,
and, in bash versions newer than bash-4.4, you can change $0 by assigning
to BASH_ARGV0.

So I assume that you want to change the kernel's idea of the process
arguments as seen and displayed by `ps'. If so, I'm not really interested
in adding that as a feature. It doesn't seem to add anything for shell
users.

--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

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