[Hizonner]

I know exactly how it works, thanks.

The hangup here seems to be the definition of "program". I'm using it to mean something roughly like "executable", which I think is fairly close to what the original article meant it to mean. You seem to be using some concept of "program" that makes each of busybox's functions a separate program. As far as I'm concerned, on the other hand, busybox is one big program that does a lot of largely unrelated things, choosing which of them to do based on how it's invoked. There's no right answer. You could say that all of the software running on a whole computer is one giant program, and in fact sometimes I do find it convenient to think of it that way.

I don't know that your definition of "program" is wrong, but I do think it's alien to this context.

[mariusor]

OK, apologies.

Then your previous statement makes no sense in context. At least to me.

Yes busybox knows it's busybox. But busybox doesn't do anything if it is not invoked in a certain way which relies on argv[0] being what it is today. I am not sure what you're arguing for frankly.

[Hizonner]

I'm arguing against the idea that the way argv[0] works is somehow wrong, and/or perhaps should be changed to "more reliably" reflect the filename of the executable that actually got loaded, because some programmer might not understand what argv[0] actually does.

The article's lead argument for the "badness" of argv[0] seems to be, roughly paraphrased, that "the program should already know what it is [true], and this could confuse it [Huh? No I don't really know what that means either]". That's followed by a bunch of other stuff about other programs guessing what executable is running in a given process based on its argv[0], which is of course just deeply ignorant misuse of the value.

I mean, "the name" of the file that got loaded isn't even necessarily either well defined, or useful under any definition.

[mariusor]

Then it looks like I'm terrible at reading comprehension today, I understood you were arguing the same thesis as OP. Apologies, again. :)