[Toybox] weird ps truncation

[enh]

haven't had time to investigate, but i had an (internal) bug report
that -f now truncates CMD to 2 characters:

marlin:/ # ps -f
UID            PID  PPID C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
root          9280   598 1 48:56 pts/1    00:00:00 sh+
root          9283  9280 4 48:58 pts/1    00:00:00 ps+
marlin:/ #



On Tue, Jan 31, 2017 at 2:15 PM, enh <enh at google.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 31, 2017 at 12:13 AM, Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 01/30/2017 04:20 PM, enh wrote:
>>> On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 4:16 PM, Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
>>>> On 01/27/2017 06:00 PM, enh wrote:
>>>>> Android has a lot of long usernames. the bluetooth code, for example,
>>>>> runs as "bluetooth", and the camera code as "cameraserver". ideally
>>>>> the USER column would grow to fit (especially when the tty is very
>>>>> wide), but right now it's kind of narrow, doesn't grow, and truncates
>>>>> from left rather than the right:
>>>>
>>>> The -w flag disables this, it doesn't just ignore screen width but
>>>> disables truncation of all fields. (I.E. all strings print at their full
>>>> length.)
>>>
>>> (yes, though it can be hard to read because the columns get shifted about.)
>>>
>>>> As for changing the default behavior: I already made the numeric fields
>>>> leak. Now it sounds like you want the string values to leak and reclaim
>>>> space, which is a less bounded problem. (The numbers aren't going to
>>>> leak _that_ much, but each string could be wider than the screen.)
>>>
>>> no, that wasn't actually what i was thinking about. i was thinking
>>> about sizing each column to contain its widest value. sort of more
>>> like how columnated ls works.
>>
>> Doable, but expensive. top is already taking 5% cpu on my netbook as
>> opposed to ubuntu top's 1.6%. I have a todo item to profile what it's
>> spending its time on and trying to streamline that a bit, but it's a
>> ways down the todo list. :)
>>
>>>> So what behavior do you _want_ here: swap in numbers, leak/reclaim, or
>>>> preread all preread all the entries and calculate column values like ls
>>>> does? Or just truncate from left instead of from right?
>>>
>>> what you've already checked in, fixing the truncation to be
>>> consistent, gets us back to where we were.
>>>
>>> beyond that i'm not sure...
>>
>> Me neither.
>>
>>> the "+" to show we did truncate seems helpful.
>>
>> Fiddly to implement though. The STIME field is truncated during normal
>> display, having that _not_ turn the last digit into + every time
>> requires a special case. And that's sounding like I need to audit all
>> the fields to see which ones need this...
>>
>> (I found a bug while I was working on that, it didn't copy the null
>> terminator when stripping /dev off the tty name so the display could
>> have trailing garbage.)
>>
>> Also I've now been staring at the code long enough I don't remember why
>> I only did the utf8 parsing when we a tty? We jump through hoops to find
>> the controlling tty, including checking /dev/tty, because ps without -a
>> only shows processes attached to the current terminal. But that doesn't
>> involve our OUTPUT being to a tty, ala "ps | cat"... So why was I making
>> that distinction again? Hmmm...
>>
>> It's 2 am, I should go to bed.
>>
>>> switching from USER to UID seems like a clever special case, .
>>
>> Yes, but what's expected behavior here?
>
> no idea. i was just giving my opinion of the various choices. i
> personally don't really like the switch from USER to UID. that doesn't
> seem like it would ever be what i wanted. certainly makes scripting
> hard.
>
>>> doing the "+" is at least an obvious signal that something's going on
>>> here. i'm surprised no one's noticed before now that "bluetooth" gets
>>> truncated. actually, here's the list of usernames that get truncated
>>> on a Pixel:
>> ...
>>> 9 u0_a10000
>>>
>>> (that last one is the start of a block of generated usernames of
>>> length 9, corresponding to installed apps.)
>>>
>>> maybe Android should just default to 12?
>>
>> In ps, in top, or in both? And would you still want the +?
>
> good question. but for now i haven't actually had any complaints about
> usernames being truncated. only SELinux label truncation has caused
> confusion (afaik), and that's already at 30. i think SELinux labels
> are the strongest motivating example for some kind of truncation
> marker. or column resizing like ls.
>
> some have suggested using fully-qualified app names (such as
> "com.android.providers.calendar" or "com.facebook.katana") instead of
> the generated u0_a2 style of naming, but -- even though those are
> theoretically more helpful -- that just seems like it's going to make
> it less likely that folks will see useful names. everything showing up
> as "com.and+" isn't much better than everything showing up as
> "com.andr" :-)
>
>> Rob
>
>
>
> --
> Elliott Hughes - http://who/enh - http://jessies.org/~enh/
> Android native code/tools questions? Mail me/drop by/add me as a reviewer.



-- 
Elliott Hughes - http://who/enh - http://jessies.org/~enh/
Android native code/tools questions? Mail me/drop by/add me as a reviewer.