Change real process name in C on Linux

Question

I'm currently trying to change the process name of a process so I can read the more easily with htop, top, .... I want to LD_PRELOAD this code into another process so it gets renamed by an environemt variable.

I found a lot of stuff in the internet, but nothing works:

prctl(PR_SET_NAME, "Test");

This does not work because htop is not honoring the name.

Nginx setproctitle (Link) doesn't work as well, because it strips the parameters (which are needed by the process).

I tried everything I found and now I'm out of ideas.

Is this even possible in linux? And how?

Answer 1

Just run your program by shell script or your program through exec and pass desired name as argv[0]:

#/bin/bash
exec -a fancy_name a.out ...

or C/C++:

execl( "./a.out", "fancy_name", ... );