PATCH for a more-POSIX `ps', and related adventures

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 7:43 PM -0500 3/24/04, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
>At 4:52 PM -0500 3/24/04, Albert Cahalan wrote:
>
>>  > I am not thrilled with that idea, but at the moment I can't
>>  > think of a better one.  I *would* like to support matches of
>>  > both real and effective users.  I guess we could add some
>>  > other option which would say "use the POSIX definitions of
>>  > -u and -U", but that doesn't exactly thrill me either.
>>
>>Why not? Tru64 uses the CMD_ENV environment variable to
>>handle this. Linux does too, with PS_PERSONALITY taking
>>priority. So, on either OS, you can do:
>
>I don't like keying a command's option-parsing behavior off of
>environment variables.  I can be talked into it if it would be
>following some precedent in other OS's, but my initial-reaction
>to this tactic (for any command) is to avoid it.  Please note that
>this isn't some multi-month project that I've been working on, I
>have been looking at this for less than a week, and very little
>of that week.  I just thought I'd do some of the "easy stuff"
>that would get our `ps' a little closer to SUSv3.
>
>So, given a little time you might be able talk me into using
>environment vars to clean this up, but at the moment: ENOTIME...

I should mention that I have been thinking of MAYBE creating some
new command, say `psx', which would be much more SUSv3 compatible.
It would be the same source code as `ps', and the behavior would
key off of the name of the executable.  Actually, maybe two new
commands, `psbsd' and `psx'.  In 5.x-stable we would have `ps'
be exactly the same as `psbsd', and in 6.x-current we could have
`ps' be exactly the same as `psx'.  That way, scripts which HAD to
work on both systems could pick the executable that they wanted.

I haven't discussed that with anyone else yet, though.  It's just
something that came to mind when I was thinking about all these
conflicting-options over the weekend.  For all I know, everyone
here would hate the idea...  Give me another week to think about
it, and I might even hate the idea!

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu