This is a subtle problem I find today. The ps command can show command arguments for a process, but I find the feature crippled.
For a shell command line like this:
gdbserver localhost:5050 testg "hello world" 123
We know that gdbserver's main() will see:
| argv[] | C string |
|---|---|
| argv[1] | localhost:5050 |
| argv[2] | testg |
| argv[3] | hello world |
| argv[4] | 123 |
However, ps -ef shows
gdbserver localhost:5050 testg hello world 123
So it looks like argv[3] is hello, which is so misleading.
So may question is clear, is there way to have ps show genuine argv[] values? man ps does not seem to refer to this issue. If it can't, any alternative tools?
Here is a screen shot from Ubuntu Linux 20.04.
