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I've been bitten by and tried to work around this as well. From what I can tell, the best you can really do is to parse by matching up parens, but someone could totally make a program with braces in its name. If I make a binary called "foo) R 10 20 30", the /proc/<pid>/stat entry will contain "1715376 (foo) R 10 20 30) 1544883 1715376 1544883...". It's terribly non-obvious how to deal with correctly.

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> It's terribly non-obvious how to deal with correctly.

Like the post says: read the whole thing into memory and do a reverse search for the last ')', i.e. strrchr

Once you are aware of the problem, it's obvious how to solve it, but I do agree that the hidden danger here is not immediately obvious at first.

Note that man page says that the name is truncated to 16 chars, so if for whatever reason you don't want to do unbounded length read then you can use that

They actually allow up to 64 characters in the kernel: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/8395ae05cb5a2e31d3610...

This might just be for certain kernel things though. I don't see any regular processes that aren't truncated, but I see a bunch of kernel things that have more than 16 chars on my system.

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