[Toybox] Chromium's producing even _more_ insane ps data.

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Thu Jun 2 12:40:23 PDT 2016


It's good to have stress tests, but I've already built the 0.7.1 release
binaries. :P

Those strange "chro" processes chromium-browser produces on Ubuntu 14.04
are even weirder than I thought, I was trying to get ps to show them and
it instead decided to say:

$ ./ps -O args -p 11322
  PID TTY          TIME ARGS                        CMD                        
11322 ?        00:04:09 o                           chromium-browse

Investigating why ARGS is showing up as "o", I find this:

$ hexdump -C /proc/11322/cmdline
00000000  2f 75 73 72 2f 6c 69 62  2f 63 68 72 6f 6d 69 75  |/usr/lib/chromiu|
00000010  6d 2d 62 72 6f 77 73 65  72 2f 63 68 72 6f 00 00  |m-browser/chro..|
00000020  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000030  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00                       |.........       |

That's a lotta null bytes appended to the truncated command line.

What ps is doing is treating each of those as appended "" arguments, so
it thinks it should display:

chro "" "" "" "" "" "" "" "" "" "" ""

And so on. It's turning each NUL into a space, and then showing the
rightmost 30-ish bytes (whatever the field width is), and that leaves
just enough space for the last letter of the truncated "chro".

So now that I've worked out why it's doing that... what IS the right
behavior here? I can truncate trailing nuls but how do I distinguish
them from _actual_ trailing "" "" "" "" arguments I might really want
to display somehow? (Possibly in a less ambiguous way than just
as trailing spaces...)

Sigh. Not that ps is going to distinguish between echo "" "" "" "" "" and
echo "     " at the best of times. (You'd think with the amount of
effort Jorg Schilling's posix committee has put into language lawyering
and arguing they'd have explored some actual edge cases, but no.)

Maybe I should add -o QUOTARGS to unambigously represent command line
contents with quotes argument arguments and %XX hex escapes similar to
URL quoting? (In this case screw utf8: surround each argument with
quotes and %escape anything <32, >=127 (plus % and ").

Sigh, I hate making up new "standards". Any opinions here?

Rob


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