Whenever a program first begins to run,
Unix provides it with two arrays of information: its command-line
arguments, and the environment under which it was run. When you run
ps(1) to see what processes are doing,
ps prints the command line that was used to run
each program.
To provide more useful information (such as current status or host
connected to), sendmail saves its command line
and environment, then periodically uses that system space to display
its status. This ability provides a valuable tool for monitoring what
each invocation of sendmail is doing.
The method to display this information is correctly defined in
sendmail/conf.c
(include/sm/conf.h with V8.12 and above) for all
supported systems. In the rare event that you need to port
sendmail to another system, you can do so by
defining SPT_TYPE in sendmail/conf.h. The values
that can be assigned to this SPT_TYPE are listed in Table 3-13.
Table 3-13. Values available for use with SPT_TYPE
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SPT_BUILTIN
|
The system library has setproctitle(2).
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SPT_CHANGEARGV
|
Write pointers to our own strings into the existing argv vector.
|
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SPT_NONE
|
Don't try to set the process title at all.
|
|
SPT_PSSTRINGS
|
Use the magic PS_STRINGS pointer (4.4BSD).
|
|
SPT_PSTAT
|
Use the PSTAT_SETCMD option to pstat(2).
|
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SPT_REUSEARGV
|
Replace your argv with the information.
|
|
SPT_SCO
|
Write to the kernel's u. area.
|
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SPT_SYSMIPS
|
Use sysmips(2) supported by NEWS-OS 6.
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If you set SPT_TYPE to SPT_REUSEARGV, you will also have to define
SPT_PADCHAR, the character used to pad the process title. If the
SPT_PADCHAR compile-time macro is undefined, the space character is
used to pad.
New ports should be reported to
sendmail@sendmail.org so that they can be folded
into future releases.
