SPUG: assigning to $0; different Linuces

[Jeremy G Kahn]

Ben Reser wrote:

>On Thu, Aug 28, 2003 at 06:03:20PM -0700, Jeremy G Kahn wrote:
>  
>
>>But when I run the same thing on redhat 7.3 (kernel 2.4, perl version 
>>5.8.0 for i686-linux) I get these results:
>>    
>>
>>Notice that the name of process 14104 does *not* change.
>>
>>This is really irritating, since the assign-to-$0 is a nice feature, 
>>when you're doing lots of fork-ing and exec-ing.  Does anybody know how 
>>one would check that a system can do this from within a script? Or a 
>>configuration variable in Linux that somebody might be able to tune?
>>    
>>
>
>After some testing I can replicate this on 5.8.0 on Mandrake 9.1/ppc.
>My version of 5.8.1 RC4 on another machine Mandrake 9.2(cooker) works
>fine.  So it looks like it is a perl bug in 5.8.0 that has been fixed in
>5.8.1.
>  
>
http://search.cpan.org/author/JHI/perl-5.8.1-RC4/pod/perldelta.pod#Platform_specific_fixes

Turns out it indeed is a bug in 5.8.0.  I don't know why it works on my 
Debian 5.8.0 installation; all I can assume is that it was patched in 
some incremental fix for 5.8.0-debian .

Thanks for the advice!

--jeremy