rsm@ut-ngp.UUCP (Robert S. Maier) (05/14/86)
Pardon the following naive question; I'm trying to learn the fine art
of UNIX hacking on my own.
'Ps' reports the names of login shells as if they had a hyphen ("-")
prefix. E.g., -csh for csh. Processes started up by the 'adb'
debugger also have their names reported by 'ps' with a hyphen. I have
used adb to dig into the run-time stack of several such processes, and
have found that the argv[0] strings do indeed contain such hyphens as
prefixes. I presume that this means that when 'login' and 'adb' use
'execve' to start up a shell, they genuinely precede the shellname by
a hyphen. My question is, why? My man page on execve(2) says nothing
about such an option. Or is there another explanation?
Robert Maier
ARPA: rsm@ngp.utexas.edu / rsm@carl.ma.utexas.edu (.ma. infix is new!)
UUCP: ...{allegra, ihnp4, seismo!ut-sally} ! ut-ngp ! rsm