This is an excerpt from the latest version perlfaq8.pod, which
comes with the standard Perl distribution. These postings aim to
reduce the number of repeated questions as well as allow the community
to review and update the answers. The latest version of the complete
perlfaq is at
http://faq.perl.org .
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8.33: Is there a way to hide perl's command line from programs such as "ps"?
First of all note that if you're doing this for security reasons (to
avoid people seeing passwords, for example) then you should rewrite your
program so that critical information is never given as an argument.
Hiding the arguments won't make your program completely secure.
To actually alter the visible command line, you can assign to the
variable $0 as documented in perlvar. This won't work on all operating
systems, though. Daemon programs like sendmail place their state there,
as in:
$0 = "orcus [accepting connections]";
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