I was recently trying to write a Go program that's something like chpst or setpriv: it execs another program with an altered process state by changing the user ID or modifying the ambient capabilities. (My program is Linux-specific.)
In Go, when you want to spawn another process (fork+exec in Posix-land) you have the option of a very high-level API in os/exec or a lower-level API in the form of os.StartProcess. But os.StartProcess still does a lot of work. In my program where I need to exec without forking, I did not have the benefit of either os/exec or os.StartProcess, and I ended up having to copy Linux-specific code from the syscall package here: https://github.com/golang/go/blob/187a41dbf730117bd52f871009466a9679d6b718/src/syscall/exec_linux.go#L104 If I wanted to fork+exec, then I could've implemented my features easily by using the fields in the platform-specific syscall.SysProcAttr. However, because I wanted to exec only, no easy options were available to me, and my code ended up doing about a dozen raw syscalls, using runtime.LockOSThread, using unsafe, and being generally unpleasant. My question is: would it make sense to add an API similar to os.StartProcess for exec-without-fork? For now I'm just wondering if there is any showstopper that makes this unreasonable; if there isn't then I'll file a proposal with more details. Here are two potential problems that I considered: 1. Is exec-without-fork fundamentally at odds with Go and its runtime somehow, like fork-without-exec is? I don't see why that would be the case. 2. Is the concept of exec-without-fork incoherent on non-Posix systems? I mainly worry about Windows; after some brief googling it did seem like you can exec on Windows, though I admit the situation isn't at all clear to me. So am I missing any reason why an os.StartProcess-like API for exec-ing would be untenable? Thanks! Caleb -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
