Date: Mon, 31 May 2004 17:08:47 +0200 From: "Cyrille Lefevre" <clefevre-lists@9online.fr> To: <arch@freebsd.org>, "Garance A Drosihn" <drosih@rpi.edu> Subject: Re: Change to "kludge option processing" in /bin/ps Message-ID: <05ff01c44721$7239cce0$7890a8c0@dyndns.org> References: <p0602040cbcd70df2894b@[128.113.24.47]>
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"Garance A Drosihn" <drosih@rpi.edu> wrote:
> After staring at the kludge-option processing in `ps' for awhile, I
> found enough edge-cases where it simply did not work "right" (for my
> definition of "right", at keast...), so I rewrote it. As part of that,
> I also removed the ancient "BACKWARD_COMPATIBILITY" compile-time
> option, where:
> ps -options arg1 arg2
> (with no '-' on "arg1" and "arg2") was treated as:
> ps -options -N arg1 -M arg2
how about to keep the historical compability if there is no `-' and
to get rid of it if there is a trailing `-' ?
> I did this because I have often been puzzled/annoyed when I type:
> ps 12
> to get process 12, and then realize I wanted it shown in a
> different format so I type:
> ps -u 12
well, this should be fixed, but w/o breaking the historical compability.
> and I get a completely different list of processes, or I type:
> ps 12 34
old plain ps does not support multiple process IDs, the newer one would,
at most, accept "ps '12 34'" or "ps '12,34'", but not "ps 12 34".
> and I only see process 12, or I type
> ps 12 34 56
> and get the error message:
> ps: 56: No such file or directory
> This BACKWARD_COMPATIBILITY is not documented in the usage()
> or the man page, so I'd like to replace it.
this is historical and should not be touch even if not documented,
or better, this has to be documented.
> So, I changed `ps' to check for any additional arguments after
> processing all '-'-options, and if those start with a digit then
> `ps' will try to use the entire argument as a pid or pidlist.
> If an extra argument does not start with a digit, then `ps' just
> prints an error and exits.
so, the historical behaviour of ps will be broken :(
> I want to do more testing on this before committing, but I thought
> that all this was enough of a change that I should also give people
> a chance to scream before I commit it. Also, I'm not sure if I
> might have clobbered some subtle aspect of the kludge processing.
before to commit new changes, think about how to fix the following ones :)
# ps -p ,,
PID TT STAT TIME COMMAND
0 ?? ZW 0:00.00 (sshd)
# psx -p ,,
psx: no process id specified
# ps -p 1,
PID TT STAT TIME COMMAND
0 ?? ZW 0:00.00 (sshd)
# psx -p 1,
psx: no process id specified
PID TTY TIME COMMAND
1 ?? 00:00:07 init
PS : as you can see, the changes I proposed does work in such cases :P
also, what about the proposed changes I have submitted ?
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=bin/65803
the next step will be the dynamic field sizing and probably
the support of "-k sortlist" option, both from NetBSD.
> If anyone wants to try the update, it is available at:
>
> http://people.freebsd.org/~gad/ps-kludge.diff
>
> [disclaimer: at the moment it's only had about 15 minutes of
> testing, but I *think* this is about the way I want it to work]
>
> Assuming there aren't any major objections to these ideas, I plan
> to do some more testing on this and commit it next weekend.
as said before, I dislike the change as proposed, but would accept it
w/ a little more work.
Cyrille Lefevre.
--
home: mailto:cyrille.lefevre@laposte.net
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