[jrockway]

I think argv[0] is fine. It sounds like there is a lot of bad security scanning software that doesn't understand how the `exec` syscall works. That sounds like their problem and not a fundamental problem with argv[0].

Most people use argv[0] so they can do something like:

   $ mycommand help
   Type `mycommand foo bar` to foo bars.

   $ mycommand1.2.3 help
   Type `mycommand1.2.3 foo bar` to foo bars.

This is admittedly less fun when mycommand is /home/jrockway/.cache/bazel/_bazel_jrockway/7f95bd5e6dcc2e75a861133ddc7aee82/execroot/_main/bazel-out/k8-fastbuild/mycommand/mycommand_/mycommand` however.

[yencabulator]

I routinely use basename(arg0) in my programs.

[denysvitali]

I don't think argv[0] includes the full path (or at least some programming language strip the whole path and keep only the last part)

[denysvitali]

I stand corrected - C, Go and Python are all consistent here and show the full path.

I seem to recall there was a language that only provided the stripped part - but I guess my memory is failing me here. Sorry for the wrong information above.

[account42]

It depends on the caller not on the language of the program being called. If you execute something via $PATH then most shells will only pass the command you typed and not the full path. Similarly, when you use a relative path like ./command then usually your argv0 will be that relative path and not the full path to the executable. So in practice argv may or may not be a full path and if it does not contain a slash then it generally isn't even a relative path (well, not relative to the current directory anyway).

For the help case in gp I think it makes sens for programs to always strip away anything up to including the last slash from argv0.

[jrockway]

Languages might remove the dirname part, but argv[0] is not necessarily a path, it's just a string passed to the exec system call that is also passed to main(int argc, char *argv). While many languges don't call their main function that, somewhere in the runtime that's what it gets.