dbus-daemon-1 runs as user 81, messagebus Because messagebus is 10 chars long, it breaks ps output slightly, which shows it as UID rather than name: [cricker@yoshimi cricker]$ ps -ef | grep ^81 81 2918 1 0 12:00 ? 00:00:00 dbus-daemon-1 --system [cricker@yoshimi cricker]$ Any reason this account can't be named msgbus instead? Or dbus? Or something else <= 8 chars?
we could just fix ps... seems lame to modify this for that reason.
Oh sure, but ps is hardly the only tool which assumes 8-char usernames. They mostly work these days, but there's still enough stupid stuff like this that if they can reasonably be avoided, I'd think they should be....
Sorry, by "they" I meant "account names over 8 characters long" -- I gotta start reading what I write before I click commit ;-)
Well, ps uses uid instead of cutting off the name to make it fit into a column. How would you fix that? changing the column output of ps can break lots of scripts.
Scripts assume the column width or the column separator? I guess we can change to "mesgbus" or something like that, you're right it probably breaks something to be longer.
some scripts assume one, some the other.... I think the only "fix" which would be possible for ps would be what top and some of the other tools do -- just truncate to 8 characters anything longer. That's not really ideal though either, and might also break scripts Avoiding it when possible and leaving ps alone is probably sanest
truncate the name? That would break all tools extracting the name and using it. Currently they get the uid instead if the name would be truncated, and most apps accept uids instead of usernames. Truncating would break that.
Closing fixed, thanks