The process.title property returns the current process title (i.e. returns the current value of ps). Assigning a new value to process.title modifies the current value of ps.

When a new value is assigned, different platforms will impose different maximum length restrictions on the title. Usually such restrictions are quite limited. For instance, on Linux and macOS, process.title is limited to the size of the binary name plus the length of the command-line arguments because setting the process.title overwrites the argv memory of the process. Node.js v0.8 allowed for longer process title strings by also overwriting the environ memory but that was potentially insecure and confusing in some (rather obscure) cases.

Assigning a value to process.title might not result in an accurate label within process manager applications such as macOS Activity Monitor or Windows Services Manager.