Windows GUI process name wildcard

[NikitaVirshych]

When trying to set process name as NAME* saving appends .exe at the and making it NAME*.exe. Is it a bug or intended behavior? I'm trying to work around programm renaming itself as NAME.exe.old.[timestamp] after updating.

[identity-wael]

That suffix is added by the Windows GUI save logic in v4.0.0. In SaveNewRuleCommand, anything other than * gets .exe appended unless it already ends in .exe, contains .exe , or contains a semicolon. So NAME* becomes NAME*.exe, exactly as you observed.

For your use case, that normalization changes the meaning of the wildcard: NAME*.exe will not match NAME.exe.old.12345, because the latter does not end in .exe.

A version-specific workaround to try is a semicolon-separated pair:

NAME.exe;NAME.exe.old.*

That bypasses the suffix-appending branch while keeping the match limited to the normal executable and its renamed versions. Reopen the saved rule and check that the pattern is retained, then check the actual process name in the connection log. I verified the save condition in source, but have not run the Windows GUI here.

The current master GUI has been rewritten in C and its save handler does not contain this suffix-appending step, so please include your installed version if reporting it.

[NikitaVirshych]

Thanks a lot, that worked.