[RESOLVED] [POSIX] fork() and setting process name of new process

[wossname]

Does anyone known how to specify the name of a child process that is created using the fork() function?

I want to be able to fork() 4 times and have each process have a different name to make debugging easier and also so that users can kill the processes by name if a problem occurs.

I have just found this page (http://www.uofr.net/~greg/processname.html) which would work but is a bit nasty as it depends on the length of the original parent's name. And also it only changes the commandline string not the actual process name.

My aim is to have something nice in "top" output like...

parent00
fork00_01
fork00_02
fork00_03
fork00_04


Currently all 5 of my processes have the same name and its impossible to tell them apart except by their process IDs, which isn't ideal.

Any ideas?

[wossname]

[RESOLVED]

A colleague of mine found a solution to this. I'm not sure how valid a solution it is though, the linux documentation doesn't appear to acknowledge it until kernel 2.6. This does allegedly work if your compilation box has 2.4 headers... I tested it and it worked beautifully on Centos 4.4.

#include <sys/prctl.h>
char* myProcessName = "HelloWorld";
...
prctl(PR_SET_NAME, (unsigned long)myProcessName, 0, 0, 0);

The nasty thing about it is that PR_SET_NAME isn't actually #defined anywhere in 2.4 headers so we had to dig around to find that it's value is 15. Passing 15 into this function does indeed do what we thought it should do. There's a sister value called PR_GET_NAME with a value of 16 but I have not yet had a chance to use that.