Unknown process on sparc

Guy Harris guy at auspex.auspex.com
Mon Feb 18 09:08:58 AEST 1991


>We noticed a process called "send-mail" (not "sendmail") running on
>one of our sun4s yesterday (running Sun Release 4.1).  Does anyone
>know :
>	What this process is?
>	How & why it was started?

Hmm.  It might be amusing to tie this thread together with one of the
"how do I find the name of a process" threads....

The "name" of a process - in the sense of "the first token that 'ps'
prints out if and when it prints the command line of a process" - is
established purely by convention.  It's whatever was passed as the 0th
argument in the last "exec" call done by that process - and, on systems
where "ps" gets the arg list from the process's stack rather than from a
big string in its U area, may be changed by the process if it wishes to
do so. 

Berkmail, when it runs "sendmail", passes it "send-mail" as its zeroth
argument, so that it runs as "send-mail" rather than "sendmail".  It
could have called it "Roland the headless Thompson gunner" if it wanted
to....

Some versions of "sendmail" will, in turn, modify the copy of their
arguments on the stack to indicate what they're working on, in the hope
that "ps" will report that.



More information about the Comp.unix.questions mailing list