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lib: allow custom names for spawned processes

Rodrigo Muino Tomonari requested to merge github/fork/ppannuto/spawn_process_name into master
Checklist
  • make -j4 test (UNIX), or vcbuild test nosign (Windows) passes
  • tests and/or benchmarks are included
  • documentation is changed or added
  • commit message follows commit guidelines
Affected core subsystem(s)

lib/child_process.js

Description of change

Add a name parameter to the options accepted by child_process.spawn that sets the spawned process name (argv[0]) to a custom value. The default behavior is unchanged if a name parameter is not supplied.

It is useful to be able to set the name of a process you are spawning. One motivating example is an application runner service that spawn several other node applications. Instead of showing up as 20 different node processes, the application runner can give them meaningful names.

While child processes can write process.title to change their name, this has two limitations:

  • it requires modifying all child processes
  • it is limited to the length of the initial argv[0] in practice

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