Re: ps buffer is incorrectly padded on the (latest) OS X

I wrote:
> Alexey Klyukin <alexk(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
>> I always wondered why ps ax|grep postgres shows several extra blank lines
>> after the process name, i.e.

> AFAIR it's always done that on OSX. I thought we'd tried the '\0'
> padding way back when and it didn't work nicely, but maybe Apple fixed
> that.

I tried this on a PPC Mac running 10.4.11, which is the oldest Mac OS
I have handy at the moment. It worked fine. The existing coding in
ps_status.c dates from late 2001, which means that it was first tested
against OS X 10.1, and most likely we have not rechecked the question
of what PS_PADDING value to use since then. My guess is that Apple
must have changed this in OS X 10.2 or 10.3, because the userland
Unix utilities were pretty well settled after that.

So I think we could definitely apply this change to HEAD/9.0, and I'm
strongly tempted to back-patch further than that. Does anybody think
that any pre-10.4 OS X versions are still in use, or would be likely
to receive Postgres updates if they do exist?

regards, tom lane