[CentOS] CentOS 7, NSF, "feature" [SOLVED]

Wed Feb 3 20:57:04 UTC 2016
Warren Young <wyml at etr-usa.com>

On Feb 3, 2016, at 10:30 AM, Ricardo J. Barberis <ricardo at palmtx.com.ar> wrote:
> 
> El Miércoles 03/02/2016, Warren Young escribió:
>> 
>> Again, I don’t know why they couldn’t just do it with links.
> 
> I guess that's probably to execute scripts and "hide" the name of the 
> interpreter, e.g.:

I get why second-rate programmers would care to do that, but what I don’t get is why systemd would need a feature to support that wish.

No, I suspect the real reason systemd needs to support this is to work around someone’s broken argv[0] parsing.  For instance, there may be a program that assumes it is always started through the PATH, so argv[0] never contains slashes.  But, systemd only works with absolute paths for security, so rather than fix the broken program, they added a feature to systemd that lets it lie to the broken program, supplying the program’s basename in argv[0] even though it was started via an absolute path.

Just a guess, of course.

I notice that none of the service files on my main EL7 box use this leading-@ feature.