[ale] why trailing spaces for init process (RHEL5)

[Danny Cox]

On Fri, 2008-05-30 at 10:11 -0400, Jerry Yu wrote:
> I redirected 'ps -ef' to a file for some compliance exercise. saw a
> blank line after init. 
> opened it up in vi and realized the 'blank line' is not a separate
> line, but a lot of trailing spaces after the init process name. This
> is on a RHEL5/i386 server.
> 
> I know init is special, but didn't notice that it is special in this
> way. anybody knows why?
> 
>       1 UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
>       2 root         1     0  0 Apr18 ?        00:00:02 init
> [5]                                                                           
>       3 root         2     1  0 Apr18 ?        00:00:00 [migration/0]

	Wild speculation follows, maybe ;-)

	It used to be that programs would change their names after starting by
copying another string to argv[0].  The extra spaces may be part of a
buffer to allow longer names than "init" ("telinit", etc.).

	On the other hand, I don't know why init itself would masquerade as any
other program.  Busybox, on the other hand.... ;-)

> 
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-- 
kernel, n.: A part of an operating system that preserves the
medieval traditions of sorcery and black art.

Danny