[Python-Dev] Pondering some changes to python.c... (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido@python.org
Mon, 08 Apr 2002 16:51:57 -0400

>-1 on making it the default -- there are programs relying on this.

Interesting point... One of the main reasons that I wanted this was that some programs rely on it NOT being there. Like "killall", etc...

When I run a Python script that has a #! directly, ps doesn't show me the "python" part -- only the script name. This is in Linux (Red Hat 7.2). Maybe it's different for you?

I think that it's totally acceptable that when you say "python foo.py" that argv[0] is seen by ps to be "python".

>+1 on providing a sys module interface for this so that programs >can choose the name on their own.

Yeah, I was thinking about that one. It's kind of complicated, unfortunately. To do it right, you need to muck around with the original argv and envp arguments. So, it will cause side-effects to any code calling the main Python entry point if we do it in there... Besides, we really end the envp anyway (which PyMain doesn't take). So, I'm thinking there would need to be a new entry point like "PyArgsSetup(int argc, char ***argv, char ***envp)", which would need to be called to set this up. You'd call "PyArgsSetup(argc, &argv, &envp)", and it would re-allocate argv and envp, and use the original data space for storing the process string.

I'm not sure I understand. If you have the argc/argv/environ set, why do you need to know &argc and &argv?

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)