Re: Feature request: exec self for NOMMU.

From: Denis Vlasenko
Date: Tue Dec 26 2006 - 23:31:39 EST


On Wednesday 27 December 2006 00:55, David Lang wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Dec 2006, Rob Landley wrote:
>
> > I'm trying to make some nommu-friendly busybox-like tools, which means using
> > vfork() instead of fork(). This means that after I fork I have to exec in
> > the child to unblock the parent, and if I want to exec my current executable
> > I have to find out where it lives so I can feed the path to exec(). This is
> > nontrivial.
> >
> > Worse, it's not always possible. If chroot() has happened since the program
> > started, there may not _be_ a path to my current executable available from
> > this process's current or root directories.
>
> does this even make sense (as a general purpose function)? if the executable
> isn't available in your path it's likly that any config files it needs are not
> available either.

busybox needs it in order to spawn, for example, gzip/bzip2 helper
for tar. We know that our own executable has this function.
How to execute _our own executable_? exec("/proc/self/exe")
works only if /proc is mounted. I can imagine that some embedded
people want to be able to not rely on that.
--
vda
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