process.title

[thom4parisot]

Spécifier un nom pour faciliter la lecture du processus dans ps et l'onglet du terminal.

cc @DavidBruant

[misterdjules]

FWIW, process.name does not exist, were you referring to process.title? If so:

1. process.title does not allow to change any terminal's window's title. To do that, one needs to use terminal escaping sequences.

2. Setting process.title is a confusing API to use. It does not behave the same on all platforms, and has some confusing limitations on all of them. I can expand on that if you'd like to get more details.

[thom4parisot]

@misterdjules correct, I was referring to process.title (bad memory).

Are there more limitations than the ones detailed on https://nodejs.org/api/process.html#process_process_title? More limitations than a size limit?

If you have time, I am curious to know more about it :-) (love reading insights from people working on the tools and languages themselves)

[misterdjules]

Are there more limitations than the ones detailed on https://nodejs.org/api/process.html#process_process_title? More limitations than a size limit?

One additional limitation is that, currently, setting process.title is a no-op on some platforms like SmartOS and AIX, even though that is being fixed.

Another is that system tools on various platforms don't always read the arguments of a process from the memory area to which node writes when setting process.title. For instance, on SmartOS, running ps -p pid -o args= reads from /proc/pid/psinfo (which is not modified by setting process.title), but running ps auxww reads from the same memory area (although one must pass at least two ww on the command line).

In other words, the resulting behavior is not consistent across platforms and even across system tools on a given platform.

[thom4parisot]

Thanks @misterdjules :-) your insights on less mainstream OS is definitely eye opening!

I think it would be good to mention this API and to state these limitations, mostly to tell people to use it only if necessary, while being extra careful.

[misterdjules]

I think it would be good to mention this API and to state these limitations, mostly to tell people to use it only if necessary, while being extra careful.

Agreed.

[thom4parisot]

Thanks a lot @misterdjules for your very interesting knowledge :-)

Feel free to raise issues with unusual developer stuff or whatever you find interesting.