Comment author: administrator

In reference to the fix for finding the program name on linux:

http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs/fixed?id=557

This causes a problem for me with both byte-code and native-code Ocaml
problems, they can no longer tell how the user invoked them, and the
user may have put something in argv[0] on purpose as I wish to.

Right.

If the desire is to only find the full path to the program, instead of
the relative path that linux provides, and I believe linux puts the
relative path to the program in arg[0], would it not be possible to
just prepend getcwd() to argv[0], if arg[0] does not begin with '/' to
achieve what you want?

In general, no. For one thing, argv[0] may refer to an executable
that is in $PATH, so we have to do path searching (ocamlrun already
does this). Still, this breaks if argv[0] is a relative name and not
in the path, which can happen under Linux as shown in bug #557.
Moreover, both ocamlrun and the toplevel ocaml must know
the exact name of their own executable!

The solution I'm currently implementing is to leave Sys.argv.(0)
equal to argv[0] as provided at program start-up, but add a new string
Sys.executable_name containing the name of the executable as ocamlrun
determined it (by reading /proc/self/exe and searching argv[0] in the
path). This seems to satisfy all requirements.

Cheers,

• Xavier Leroy

Comment author: administrator

Fixed 2002-02-11 by XL