Ever wanted to give meaningful names to your processes when you pcntl_fork() with PHP ? proctitle is the extension you’re looking for!
Adapted from bug report #29479 and code initially wrote by Midom for Wikipedia, the proctitle extension allows for a process to change its own displayed title in the system’s process list.
Is the ability to rename a process relevant to PHP? I’ll just say that an image is worth a thousand words…
So, here it is, my good old PInetd project is soon under public beta (as soon as PHP 5.3.0beta1 gets out), and, I hope, will have people using it. PInetd is basically a framework for creating TCP, UDP or other kinds of daemons. It has a lot of features (internal IPC, fork, chroot() and setuid() helpers, process management, etc) and contains some example daemons (FTP, POP3, SMTP, DNS, HTTP, …). I think it may give ideas to a lot of people and open new possibilities for PHP.
Anyway, tonight’s goal was to make it easier to see what’s happening on pinetd without too much troubles, and allow display of some basic informations with some daemons (for example for FTPd, display name of file currently being downloaded/uploaded, etc). So, the proctitle extension is relevant to PHP!
You can get it via SVN: http://ookoo.org/svn/proctitle/ (tested with PHP 5.2.8 and PHP 5.3.0alpha3).
