It may work for top, but not ps among others. The only reliable way is clobbering argv. That's just the way it is. In my opinion, glibc should finally provide setproctitle(), so programs like postgresql or chrome (https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:bas...) don't have to resort to argv hacks.

This isn't true for the majority of operating systems.

Hmm, htop then? Whatever is reading /proc/self/cmdline