Author: | Daniele Varrazzo |
---|
The library allows a process to change its title (as displayed by system tools
such as ps
and top
).
Changing the title is mostly useful in multi-process systems, for example when a master process is forked: changing the children's title allows to identify the task each process is busy with. The technique is used by PostgreSQL and the OpenSSH Server for example.
The procedure is hardly portable across different systems. PostgreSQL provides a good multi-platform implementation: this module is a Python wrapper around PostgreSQL code.
You can use easy_install
to install the module: to perform a system-wide
installation use:
sudo easy_install setproctitle
If you are an unprivileged user or you want to limit installation to a local environment, you can use the command:
easy_install -d /target/path setproctitle
Notice that easy_install
requires /target/path
to be in your
PYTHONPATH
.
The module exports the following functions:
setproctitle(title)
- Set title as the title for the current process.
getproctitle()
- Return the current process title.
The module can be currently compiled and effectively used on the following platforms:
- GNU/Linux
- BSD
- MacOS X
- Windows
Notice that on Windows there is no way to change the process string:
what the module does is to create a Named Object whose value can be read
using a tool such as Process Explorer (contribution of a more useful tool
to be used together with setproctitle
would be well accepted).
The module can probably work on HP-UX, but I haven't found any to test with. It is unlikely that it can work on Solaris instead.
As of version 1.1 the module works with Python 3. In order to install the
module, you can use the distribute replacemente for easy_install
.
In order to build and test the module under Python 3, the Makefile
contains some helper targets.
- procname: a module exposing the same functionality, but less portable and not well packaged.
- Issue 5672: where the introduction of such functionality into the stdlib is being discussed.