AIX 7.2 Process data get by process_iter contains weird process names

[bartekmp]

AIX

• AIX 7.2
• psutil 5.6.2

Bug description
When using process_iter to iterate through process list, it is impossible to filter out some well-known processes, because in resulting Process structure name field has a wrong value, from what I reckon it contains binary name and a cropped command line, e.g. (notice 2nd line, where you can see my application myTestEnvAppInst being run and a cropped command line passed to it instead of the name):

6685142: {'pid': 6685142, 'name': 'IBM.MgmtDomainRM/opt/rsct/bin/IBM.MgmtDomainRMd'},
6095186: {'pid': 6095186, 'name': 'myTestEnvAppInst/home/labuser/workspace_direc/downloads/component/exec/lib/myTestEnvAppInst -lo'}

This is what I get when I execute this code:

proc_list = {process.pid: process.info for process in psutil.process_iter(attrs=["pid", "name"])}

Not all processes have wrong names, e.g.:

3998084: {'pid': 3998084, 'name': 'rsyslogd'}

Most of them are OK.

I also compared psutil's results to system's ps using this code:

name = "myTestEnvAppInst"
cmd = "ps -A | grep '" + name + "' | awk '{print $1}'"
ps = subprocess.Popen(cmd, shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)

and got the same pid as in the snippet above, i.e. 6095186. I also checked the ps output manually and the process name is also as expected:

6095186      -  0:00 myTestEnvAppInst

This issue is making process list filtering like this:

names = ["a", "b", "c"]
pids = [process.info["pid"] for process in psutil.process_iter(attrs=["pid", "name"]) if process.info["name"] in names]

very difficult, as you have to use some regexing to get it right. I guess this comes from binary structure of /proc but right now it doesn't always work properly.

[wiggin15]

This may have been resolved in psutil 5.6.3, which fixed a few things regarding process names and command line arguments. Can you please try that version?

[bartekmp]

Sure, will do once my team will compile v5.6.3, as there was also a bug regarding compilation on our setup. I will get back and let you know about it.

[no-response]

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