On Fri, Mar 30, 2001 at 11:07:25AM +0100, Pete Forman allegedly wrote:
> I've done a quick survey of the Suns available to me to see whether
> sendmail updates the ps display. The summary is:
>
> 1) Require "/usr/ucb/ps w" at least. /usr/bin/ps has no options
> that I can find to display the status of sendmail.
>
> 2) Older versions of sendmail do not update the status. 8.6 does
> not update, 8.8.8 does.
>
> 3) Solaris 2.5 and 2.5.1 have sendmail 8.6, 7 has 8.9.1, 8 has
> 8.9.3. Some 2.6 have 8.6, others have 8.8.8. Presumably
> patches have beed applied.
>
> On other OSs, AIX 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 have sendmail 8.8.4, 8.8.6, 8.8.8 or
> 8.9.3. They all display the status in both SysV and BSD modes.
> On AIX there is one ps command which handles both styles.
>
> IRIX 6.2 and 6.5.4m through 6.5.10m have sendmail 8.8.8, 8.9.1, 8.9.3.
> No status is available. There do not appear to be any BSD-ish ps
> options.
The way /usr/ucb/ps in Solaris extracts the status for a process requires
root rights and is (in my opinion) pretty gross. What it does is read the
pseudo-file /proc/<pid/as, which is actually the memory used by the
program. /usr/bin/ps only accesses /proc/<pid>/psinfo, which contains the
real parameters supplied to the program and not the clobbered version.
Regards,
Mathijs
--
It's not that perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language
rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has
ever done. Erik Naggum
