Finding where an executable was run from -- a proposal.

Andrew Klossner andrew at frip.gwd.tek.com
Thu May 19 04:01:14 AEST 1988


[]

	"The convention used by ksh-i is to put the full pathname used
	to exec a file in the environment variable "_"."

This is similar to the proposal of a few months ago that the shell
stuff the unparsed command line into an environment variable, and
suffers from the same problem, exemplified thus:

	ksh invokes /bin/fubar, sets "_" to "/bin/fubar"
	/bin/fubar does an exec() of /etc/fubar, leaves "_" alone.
	Now /etc/fubar sees "_" = "/bin/fubar"

A solution to this problem must be universal across all flavors of
exec(), not just system().

  -=- Andrew Klossner   (decvax!tektronix!tekecs!andrew)       [UUCP]
                        (andrew%tekecs.tek.com at relay.cs.net)   [ARPA]



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