Neat perl trick
Posted Sat, 06 Mar 2004
I've never known how programs change what their command-lines are listed as in
ps(1) output. I knew that $0 in perl would let you view what the program was called as, so I took the chance of trying to actually *set* this variable. Here's what happened:
whack(~) [530] !130! > perl -e 'sleep'& [1] 89053 whack(~) [531] > ps | grep perl 89053 p3 SL 0:00.00 perl -e sleep ... whack(~) [523] > perl -e '$0 = "Hello there!"; sleep' & [1] 89119 whack(~) [524] > ps | grep perl 89119 p3 SL 0:00.00 Hello there! (perl)Neat? I think so... You may not, whatever :)