On Fri, 10 Oct 2008, Richard Jones wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 09:33:17AM -0700, Dave Benjamin wrote:
>>
>> Thanks, Rich - this looks very comprehensive - they even go out of their
>> way to support Windows! =) However, unless I'm mistaken, I still have the
>> problem of not being able to access "argc" and "argv" to pass into
>> save_ps_display_args(). I suppose I could embed OCaml in a C program...
>
> Yes, it was intended more as a joke rather than a serious suggestion :-)

I'm starting to wonder if this all isn't one big joke that went over my 
head. =)

> I was also talking to Jim Meyering about the possibility of adding
> this code to gnulib[1] which would make it more widely available to
> all programs.

Yeah, it would be really nice to get a safe version of this feature 
packaged up somewhere that could be installed easily. If you search the 
web for "libproctitle" you'll find a library by Dmitry V. Levin which it 
looks like he was trying to get into Debian earlier this year. I couldn't 
find it in unstable, though. There are RPMs available here:

http://sisyphus.ru/srpm/Sisyphus/setproctitle/get

That Perl module also has the low-level stuff broken out into a C library, 
though it doesn't appear like any attempt was made to release it 
independently:

http://search.cpan.org/src/OPI/Sys-Proctitle-0.03/libsetproctitle/

Hmm. Maybe it's time to replace "ps" with something more modern... this is 
all so dirty, yet it seems like monitoring process status is still a 
useful thing to be able to do, especially with the proliferation of 
multi-process servers.

Dave