Start a Process with a Name

start-process with a special name, or handle to kill it

One method is to use the -PassThru parameter, which causes Start-Process to return an object which can be used to control the process. When you're done with the process, pipe the object to Stop-Process (or call the object's Kill() method)

In cases where you need to store the object across PS sessions, you can save the variable to an XML file using Export-Clixml. Later, rehydrate the variable using Import-Clixml.

PS Session #1

$proc = Start-Process notepad -Passthru
$proc | Export-Clixml -Path (Join-Path $ENV:temp 'processhandle.xml')

PS Session #2

$proc = Import-Clixml -Path (Join-Path $ENV:temp 'processhandle.xml')
$proc | Stop-Process

How to set the process name of a shell script?

Here's a way to do it, it is a hack/workaround but it works pretty good. Feel free to tweak it to your needs, it certainly needs some checks on the symbolic link creation or using a tmp folder to avoid possible race conditions (if they are problematic in your case).

Demonstration

wrapper

#!/bin/bash
script="./dummy"
newname="./killme"

rm -iv "$newname"

ln -s "$script" "$newname"

exec "$newname" "$@"

dummy

#!/bin/bash
echo "I am $0"
echo "my params: $@"

ps aux | grep bash

echo "sleeping 10s... Kill me!"
sleep 10

Test it using:

chmod +x dummy wrapper
./wrapper some params

In another terminal, kill it using:

killall killme

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Notes

Make sure you can write in your current folder (current working directory).

If your current command is:

/path/to/file -q --params somefile1 somefile2

Set the script variable in wrapper to /path/to/file (instead of ./dummy) and call wrapper like this:

./wrapper -q --params somefile1 somefile2

Set a process name in C#

Extending what Alexei said - you could create a Dictionary< int, string > to keep track of the process ID / descriptive name that you create. Maybe you should write this out to a file in case your program crashes - but you'd need some special startup handling to deal with processes exiting.

On startup you'd want to read in the file, and check current processes to see if they match with what you have, and remove any processes that no longer exist (wrong process id or exe name). You might want to do that every time you create a new process and write to the file.

How to give the java process a name in the operating system (other than java)

If you need to be able to differentiate between different java programs you can use the jps command that gives you a list of all java processes and running your program with

java -Dname=myFirstService -cp  myFirstService.jar some.client.main.MyFirstService

then if you do a:

jps -v

You will see your process correctly.

If you need to change the process name at the OS level I recommend you use http://launch4j.sourceforge.net/

python multiprocessing - access the process name inside the function called with Process.start(target=func)

You can use the current_process function:

from multiprocessing import Process, current_process

def somefunc():
    print current_process().name

if __name__ == '__main__':
    p = Process(target=somefunc)
    p.start()
    print p.name

How to start a PHP process with a name?

Check what the top level PHP script is using ps axuf or a similar command.

PowerShell - How to use 'Start-Process' and rename the newly launched windowtitle

A "dirty" solution would be:

start-process powershell.exe -argument "`$host.ui.RawUI.WindowTitle = 'New window title rename example text'; get-content -Path $c -wait"

I would recommend creating a script for you commands and use parameters for input.

Untitled2.ps1

param($c)
$host.ui.RawUI.WindowTitle = 'New window title rename example text'
Get-Content -Path $c -Wait

Script

$script = Get-Item ".\Desktop\Untitled2.ps1"
$c = Get-Item ".\Desktop\t.txt"
Start-Process powershell.exe -ArgumentList "-File $($script.FullName) -c $($c.FullName)"

Is there a way to change effective process name in Python?

Simply put, there's no portable way. You'll have to test for the system and use the preferred method for that system.

Further, I'm confused about what you mean by process names on Windows.

Do you mean a service name? I presume so, because nothing else really makes any sense (at least to my non-Windows using brain).

If so, you need to use Tim Golden's WMI interface and call the .Change method on the service... at least according to his tutorial.

For Linux none of the methods I found worked except for this poorly packaged module that sets argv[0] for you.

I don't even know if this will work on BSD variants (which does have a setproctitle system call). I'm pretty sure argv[0] won't work on Solaris.

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