Question

When you type “ps aux” the ps command shows command arguments that the program was run with. Some programs change this as a way of indicating status. I’ve tried changing argv[] fields and it doesn’t seem to work. Is there a standard way to set the command line arguments so that they appear when the user types ps?

That is, this doesn’t work:

int main(int argc,char **argv)
{
    argv[0] = "Hi Mom!";
    sleep(100);
}

09:40 imac3:~$ ./x &
[2] 96087
09:40 imac3:~$ ps uxp 96087 
USER      PID  %CPU %MEM      VSZ    RSS   TT  STAT STARTED      TIME COMMAND
yv32      96087   0.0  0.0  2426560    324 s001  S     9:40AM   0:00.00 ./x
09:40 imac3:~$ cat x.c

Answer 1

You had the right idea, but you don’t change the pointers in argv[n], you must change the string pointed to by argv[0] itself:

#include <string.h>
#include <unistd.h>

int main(int argc,char **argv)
{
    size_t maxlen = strlen(argv[0]);

    memset(argv[0], 0, maxlen);
    strncat(argv[0], "Hi Mom!", maxlen);
    pause();

    return 0;
}

(Note that whether or not this actually changes the command name shown by ps is system-dependent).