Reading the symbol table of the currently running executable

Dan McCue mccue at turing.newcastle.ac.uk
Thu Sep 14 23:45:46 AEST 1989


    Recent discussions on the net about a program's inability to find out
    the name of the running executable point up a deficiency in the
    OS interface of UNIX(s).  Of course, on systems that support dynamic
    loading, this problem generalizes to finding out the name of 
    ALL of the executable images in an address space (and where they are 
    loaded).  The only UNIX operating system I am aware of that
    provides this service (reliably, in user mode) is Apollo's Domain/OS.

    Two questions:

    Are there other systems that provide a "system service" for finding
    the (path)name/load map of the running executable(s)?

    Are any of the UNIX standardization bodies either official (e.g.,
    POSIX, X/OPEN) or unoffical (e.g., OSF, Unix International) working
    on this problem?



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