Re: How to get process command line?

On 06.02.2026 15:01, Stuart Henderson wrote:
> On 2026-02-06, Thomas Kupper <mailing.list@kupper.li> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm playing around with Chrony and used setproctitle() to set the title
>> of the involved process (main, helper and NTS helper).
>>
>> And I can't figure out how to receive the command line the application
>> was started with after using setproctitle().
>>
>> E.g. running 'ps -o command' outputs before setproctitle():
>>
>> $ ps -auxo command | fgrep chronyd
>> _chrony 43240 <snip> chronyd -F 0 -u _chrony -d -f /etc/chrony.conf
>> _chrony 77494 <snip> chronyd -F 0 -u _chrony -d -f /etc/chrony.conf
>> root 18016 <snip> chronyd -F 0 -u _chrony -d -f /etc/chrony.conf
>>
>> running 'ps -o command' outputs after setproctitle():
>>
>> $ ps -auxo command | fgrep chronyd
>> _chrony 47331 <snip> chronyd: server (chronyd)
>> _chrony 64136 <snip> chronyd: NTS helper (chronyd)
>> root 56489 <snip> chronyd: PRV helper (chronyd)
>>
>> What tool would show the calling command line? Would someone be able to
>> nudge me into the right direction?
>
> You would need to save it before calling setproctitle (depending on
> exactly what you want this for, you could possibly change the
> setproctitle call to add the contents of argv)

Thank you Stuart, I will then not set the process title for the first
one (server). That seems the easiest way. Mmh or add it at the end as
you suggested (like pflogd).

I thought that maybe something similar to /proc/<proc id>/cmdline would
exists and I was just to thick to find it.

It was generally meant as an easy way to see the command line arguments
used to start a application, mostly for debugging purposes (httpd, sshd, ).