Join the Process Identifier Preservation Society today!
Process Identifiers (PIDs) are a scarce resource.
On Linux they are only 15 bits by default.
The Process Identifier Preservation Society (PIPS) aims to reduce abuse
and wastage of the PID space.
To join the society please read the following advice.
Common issues
Several languages generally allow you to run all your code in one process.
Some of the code that you might want to incorporate or use is not available
in the form of ELF libraries or language specific libraries but only in the
form of ELF binaries or interpreted scripts.
As a result using additional PID space is sometimes unavoidable.
Many languages have multiple methods of starting external processes and
usually some of them waste PID space by running commands in a shell.
You can avoid those methods or use the exec builtin to preserve the shell PID.
It might be tempting to explicitly use shell in languages that don't allow
implicit shell use but that just wastes extra PIDs.
Several languages allow you to fork one process into two, this uses an extra
PID and is to be avoided unless nessecary.
Shell
Programs written in the shell languages use a lot of PIDs.
Even shells that have a lot of shell builtins (like busybox sh)
appear to use the PID space by forking a child process.
To join PIPS you should just stop writing programs in shell or use
as many builtins as possible and use exec to preserve PIDs.
Init
Several init systems are written in or use shell extensively
and thus eat huge bowls of PIDs for breakfast.
To join the PIPS you should switch away from sysvinit, openrc, init=/bin/sh etc.
C/C++
The common issues section applies to the C/C++ language.
To join PIPS you should rewrite your code to use fork()+exec()
or libpipeline instead of the system() and popen() functions.
Perl
The common issues section applies to the Perl language.
To join PIPS you should rewrite your code to avoid backticks and
only pass arrays to the system(), open(), open2(), open3() functions.
PHP
The common issues section applies to the PHP language.
To join PIPS you should rewrite your code to use pcntl_exec() instead
of backticks, exec(), system(), passthru(), shell_exec(), popen() and
proc_open(). Apparently pcntl_exec() is disabled by default on Debian
and pcntl_* are often unavailable so you should just not spawn processes.
You could also just drop PHP already.
Python
The common issues section applies to the Python language.
To join PIPS you should rewrite your code to use the subprocess module
and avoid passing shell=True to the subprocess.Popen() function.
The os.system(), os.popen() functions and the commands module all
run their commands in a shell, wasting PID space.
The popen2 module requires passing arrays instead of strings in
order to avoid the command being run in a shell.
Haskell
The common issues section applies to the Haskell language.
To join PIPS you should only ever pass a RawCommand to createProcess
and never use the shell, system, runCommand or runInteractiveCommand
functions from the System.Process and System.Cmd libraries.
OCaml
The common issues section applies to the OCaml language.
To join PIPS you should rewrite your code to use fork+exec or the create_process*
wrappers instead of system, open_process, open_process_in, open_process_out
and open_process_full.
Go
Go allows running external processes but doesn't allow you to waste PID space
by running commands in shell. Avoid explicitly running the shell though.
Rust
Rust allows running external processes but doesn't allow you to waste PID space
by running commands in shell. Avoid explicitly running the shell though.
Erlang
The common issues section applies to the Erlang language.
To join PIPS you should rewrite your code to use erlang:open_port({spawn_executable, ...}, ...)
instead of os:cmd or the other options to erlang:open_port.
Node.js
The common issues section applies to the Node.js language.
To join PIPS you should rewrite your code to use the child_process.execFile()
function (or other child_process functions) instead of child_process.exec().
Julia
Julia allows running external processes but doesn't allow you to waste PID space
by running commands in shell. It emulates a lot of shell features instead.
Avoid explicitly running the shell though.
Dart
The common issues section applies to the Dart language.
To join PIPS simply do not enable the runInShell parameter of the Process object.
PS
Let me know if I missed something in one of these languages.
You should also do most of the above to avoid shell metacharacter
injection attacks that usually allow arbitrary code execution.
Dear language authors, don't allow running external processes in shell, kthxbye!
Syndicated 2014-02-17 03:38:47 from Advogato
