Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2008 22:56:19 -0500
From: Christopher Faylor <cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please AT cygwin DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: ps executable does not appear to match source
Message-ID: <20080120035619.GA16707@ednor.casa.cgf.cx>
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On Sat, Jan 19, 2008 at 09:31:25PM -0600, paul DOT hermeneutic AT gmail DOT com wrote:
>> ps from Cygwin is the historically older version, it's using another
>> mechanism to get to all the date and, last but not least, it's a core
>> Cygwin tool under the Cygwin license.  Feel free to use procps as ps
>> by aliasing, but Cygwin's ps will not go away and it can't use procps
>> sources for licensing reasons.
>>
>> Corinna
>
>While aliasing does work for interactive and shell scripts, it does
>not work for Perl backtick expressions.  As you can see below,
>invoking 'ps' from a Perl script still results in the historically
>older version being used.
>
>$ alias ps='/bin/procps.exe'
>$ ps --version
>procps version 3.2.7
>$ perl -we 'print `ps --version`'
>ps (cygwin) 1.11
>Process Statistics
>Copyright 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 Red Hat, Inc.
>Compiled on Dec 14 2007

I believe that Corinna's response was meant as a general vague
suggestion, not a comprehensive solution to your problem.  Another
non-in-depth possible way of dealing with this is to try running procps
first and then ps second.

>I see that you have used the "licensing reasons' phrase.  Does that
>mean that this distasteful situation has no hope of ever improving?

If you are looking for a general solution to this situation then
accommodating the thousands of existing installations with the
Cygwin-specific version of ps is really your only option.  Even if we
changed the release tomorrow, there would still be a large number of
installations out there using the Cygwin-specific ps.  Also, if you want
to be truly portable, you'll have to accommodate other types of ps output
than just linux.

That said, however, the other way of dealing with this is to modify
procps to deal with Windows pids.  Then we wouldn't need the cygwin ps.
If you want to provide a patch to do that, then it's likely that the
procps maintainer would accept it -- assuming that it isn't so intrusive
as to cause an ongoing maintenance problem.

If procps can be made to do all of the things that ps now does then
there would be no reason to keep ps around.

>Where can I find a list of Cygwin programs in this situation?  Is 'ps'
>the only one?  Are there others?  Please advise.  Thanks.

mount and unmount are also not similar to linux.

cgf

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