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

[Lockywolf]

Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu> writes:

> 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.

Well, I am a shell user :).

I would really love to have such a feature because I have two use-cases
for it.

1. I would use it as a super minimalist progress indicator for one-shot
scrips written with little consideration.

For example, I sometimes find myself writing something like:
`while true; do try_something_slow && exit 0 ; sleep 1 ; done &`

With a setproctitle I would write something like:

`I=0 ; while true; do try_something_slow && exit 0 ; I=$((I + 1)) ;
setproctitle "trier_$I-times" sleep 1 ; done &`

And this leaves no lingering files, does not require finding a PID to
look at `/proc/$pid/environ`, et cetera. I can just query the progress
using `ps`.

2. I would use it to distinguish subshells from the current script in
`ps`.

By default a subshell has the same name as the parent shell.
So when I run `ps/pgrep`, I often get processes with the same name, and
I'd have to parse the output of `pstree` to find out which is which.
And running exec -a "${BASH_ARGV0}_child" while true ; do sleep 1 ; done &
is not a valid syntax.

I think this would greatly simplify debugging shell scripts, but maybe
it's just me.

>I think this is appropriate for a loadable builtin. This one is Linux-
>specific.

I am not experienced enough to have an opinion on whether a loadable
built-in is better than a feature of "exec".

-- 
Your sincerely,
Vladimir Nikishkin (MiEr, lockywolf)
(Laptop)

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