How do I change the name of my program (as seen by `ps')?

How do I change the name of my program (as seen by `ps')?


On BSDish systems, the ps program actually looks into the address
space of the running process to find the current argv[], and
displays that. That enables a program to change its `name' simply by
modifying argv[].



On SysVish systems, the command name and usually the first 80 bytes of
the parameters are stored in the process' u-area, and so can't be
directly modified. There may be a system call to change this (unlikely),
but otherwise the only way is to perform an exec(), or write into
kernel memory (dangerous, and only possible if running as root).



Some systems (notably Solaris) may have two separate versions of
ps, one in `/usr/bin/ps' with SysV behaviour, and one in
`/usr/ucb/ps' with BSD behaviour. On these systems, if you change
argv[], then the BSD version of ps will reflect the
change, and the SysV version won't.



Check to see if your system has a function setproctitle().





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