readproctitle is available in daemontools 0.75 and above.
readproctitle L D
L consists of any number of arguments.
D is one argument
consisting of at least five dots.
readproctitle reads data into the end of D, shifting D to the left to make room. This means that the most recent data is visible to process-listing tools such as ps. readproctitle always leaves three dots at the left of D.
For example, if
readproctitle io errors: ....................
reads the data
fatal error xyz
warning abc
then its command-line arguments change to
readproctitle io errors: ... xyz!warning abc!
with a newline character in place of each !.
Process-listing tools typically show the newline character
as ? or \n.
readproctitle exits when it reaches the end of input.
Beware that most implementations of ps have small argument-length limits. These limits apply to the total length of readproctitle L D. I have not seen a system with a limit below 512 bytes.