jbd0@das.harvard.edu (Jeffrey B. DeLeo) (02/16/91)
We noticed a process called "send-mail" (not "sendmail") running on one of our sun4s yesterday (running Sun Release 4.1). Does anyone know : What this process is? How & why it was started? Thanks, Jeffrey DeLeo - Racal Redac ...!harvard!silc!jbd0
guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) (02/18/91)
>We noticed a process called "send-mail" (not "sendmail") running on >one of our sun4s yesterday (running Sun Release 4.1). Does anyone >know : > What this process is? > How & why it was started? Hmm. It might be amusing to tie this thread together with one of the "how do I find the name of a process" threads.... The "name" of a process - in the sense of "the first token that 'ps' prints out if and when it prints the command line of a process" - is established purely by convention. It's whatever was passed as the 0th argument in the last "exec" call done by that process - and, on systems where "ps" gets the arg list from the process's stack rather than from a big string in its U area, may be changed by the process if it wishes to do so. Berkmail, when it runs "sendmail", passes it "send-mail" as its zeroth argument, so that it runs as "send-mail" rather than "sendmail". It could have called it "Roland the headless Thompson gunner" if it wanted to.... Some versions of "sendmail" will, in turn, modify the copy of their arguments on the stack to indicate what they're working on, in the hope that "ps" will report that.