Is it possible to hide process args from 'ps -ef'?? (Recap)

[Root Boy Jim]

In article <7293 at auspex.auspex.com> guy at auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) writes:
>The problem with method 2 above is that, unless ISC UNIX is fairly
>different from S5 as it comes from AT&T, "ps" doesn't *look* at the
>argument list on the stack - it looks at the argument list as set up in
>a string in the U area at startup, so your program can twiddle the argv
>list until the cows come home and it won't affect what "ps" sees.

Around here, we run lots of sendmail, uucp, news, and a bit of ftp.
We like to know what's going on, so we use a function called
'setproctitle' (from the sendmail distribution). A bit of ps:

  653 ?  S N  10:14 -accepting smtp connections (sendmail)
 5665 ?  I     3:51 -timbuk.cray.com IHAVE                           (in.nntpd)
 6175 ?  I     0:01 -wuarchive.wustl.edu IHAVE                       (in.nntpd)
12017 ?  S N   0:00 -mmmmmmm: SLAVE R (uucico)
12819 ?  R N   0:00 -M2C.M2C.ORG: HELO m2c.m2c.org (sendmail)
13841 ?  I N   0:03 -SSSSSSS-SSSSSS.ARMY.MIL:lskdfj: RETR ls-ltR.Z (in.ftpd)
14575 ?  I N   0:01 -AA25083 finabo.abo.fi: greeting wait (sendmail)
15843 ?  S N   0:11 -harpo.ssf-sys.DHL.COM:mbisted: RETR 1.39.tar.Z.18 (in.ftpd)
18014 ?  I N   1:21 -AA22570 tohu0.weizmann.ac.il: user open (sendmail)
29152 ?  S     4:00 -dddddd: MASTER SENDING (uucico)

We have a line in /etc/rc which says:
FILLER="                "; export FILLER
to give us some environment space to write over.

I certainly hope that future versions of UNIX will continue to provide 
this information in the same fashion. At least provide a switch.

Don't tell me this is non-portable; it just happens to be the oldest way.
-- 
		[rbj at uunet 1] stty sane
		unknown mode: sane