Small change to 'ps'

[Garance A Drosehn]

At 1:51 AM -0500 1/9/09, Mike Meyer wrote:
>On Wed, 7 Jan 2009 "Sheldon Givens" <sheldon at sigsegv.ca> wrote:
>  > And I guess I just feel like running a second command to do what should be
>>  possible to do with the first command (and is, on many platforms. ps
>>  --no-headers on linux for example) is a problem and presents opportunity for
>>  continued refinement of the utility.
>
>I agree. However, [...]
>
>So `--no-headers' is ok. However, `-n' has lots of different meanings
>in different commands. How about borrowing from existing commands that
>already implement this functionality (zfs and zpool) and using `-H',
>which is relatively rarely used elsewhere?

I recommend against adding any single-letter option to the `ps' command.
This command is already an absolute minefield of headaches when it comes
to portability across operating systems (and POSIX).  Trying to sneak in
some single-letter option is bound to give us headaches in the long run.

Adding something like '--no-headers' is pretty safe, although that
opens up a different set of arguments (heh) when it comes to `ps' on
freebsd.  Namely, we don't have any long-options in our `ps'.

Yet another tactic might be to add another accepted keyword to '-o',
since it already uses words as its acceptable values.  We'd be bending
the definition of `-o' a bit to do that, but we could at least do that
in a way which would be very unlikely to conflict with an option in
any other version of `ps'.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn     =               drosehn at rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer               or   gad at FreeBSD.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute;             Troy, NY;  USA