This crate is the safe Rust wrapper for the getargv-sys crate. libgetargv is a library that allows you to get the arguments that were passed to another running process on macOS. It is intended to provide roughly the same functionality as reading from /proc/<pid>/cmdline on Linux. On macOS this is done by parsing the output of the KERN_PROCARGS2 sysctl, which is very often implemented incorrectly, due to the overlooked possibility of leading empty arguments passed to the target process.

Installation

• Install libgetargv to your system (see below).
• Add the crate to your Cargo.toml file dependencies:

[target.'cfg(target_vendor = "apple")'.dependencies]
getargv = "~0.2.0"

Important

You should limit the dependency to just macOS unless your whole project only builds on macOS, as getargv will not build on any other OS.

Permissions

libgetargv can only see processes running as the same user by default, so be sure your process runs as the desired user (setuid, launchd.plist, sudo) or can elevate privileges.

Caution

Elevating privileges safely is extremely complicated, and will be a target of privilege escalation attacks on macOS so be extremely careful if you go this route, better to defer to the user to elevate privileges for you as needed.

System Requirements

macOS is required as this is a macOS specific sysctl, even BSD does not implement it. Your system must support sysctl and KERN_PROCARGS2, which probably means macOS 10.3 or later, though I haven't tested versions older than 10.7. You'll also need a non-ancient clang (c99 is required) or you'll have to override the compiler flags with CC, EXTRA_CPPFLAGS, and EXTRA_CFLAGS.

Building getargv

To make getargv:

• Install libgetargv to your system (see below).
• Clone this repo and run cargo build.

Installing libgetargv

To get access to libgetargv, sign up for an appropriate sponsorship tier.

Then you will be able to follow the instructions at https://github.com/getargv/getargv to install libgetargv.