How to change argv0 in bash so command shows up with different name in ps?

You can do it when running a new program via exec -a <newname>.

Just for the record, even though it does not exactly answer the original poster's question, this is something trivial to do with zsh:

ARGV0=emacs nethack

I'm assuming you've got a shell script that you wish to execute such that the script process itself has a new argv[0]. For example (I've only tested this in bash, so i'm using that, but this may work elsewhere).

#!/bin/bash

echo "process $$ here, first arg was $1"
ps -p $$

The output will be something like this:

$ ./script arg1
process 70637 here, first arg was arg1
  PID TTY           TIME CMD
70637 ttys003    0:00.00 /bin/bash ./script arg1

So ps shows the shell, /bin/bash in this case. Now try your interactive shell's exec -a, but in a subshell so you don't blow away the interactive shell:

$ (exec -a MyScript ./script arg1)
process 70936 here, first arg was arg1
  PID TTY           TIME CMD
70936 ttys008    0:00.00 /bin/bash /path/to/script arg1

Woops, still showing /bin/bash. what happened? The exec -a probably did set argv[0], but then a new instance of bash started because the operating system read #!/bin/bash at the top of your script. Ok, what if we perform the exec'ing inside the script somehow? First, we need some way of detecting whether this is the "first" execution of the script, or the second, execed instance, otherwise the second instance will exec again, and on and on in an infinite loop. Next, we need the executable to not be a file with a #!/bin/bash line at the top, to prevent the OS from changing our desired argv[0]. Here's my attempt:

$ cat ./script
#!/bin/bash

__second_instance="__second_instance_$$"
[[ -z ${!__second_instance} ]] && {
  declare -x "__second_instance_$$=true"
  exec -a MyScript "$SHELL" "$0" "$@"
}

echo "process $$ here, first arg was $1"
ps -p $$

Thanks to this answer, I first test for the environment variable __second_instance_$$, based on the PID (which does not change through exec) so that it won't collide with other scripts using this technique. If it's empty, I assume this is the first instance, and I export that environment variable, then exec. But, importantly, I do not exec this script, but I exec the shell binary directly, with this script ($0) as an argument, passing along all the other arguments as well ($@). The environment variable is a bit of a hack.

Now the output is this:

$ ./script arg1
process 71143 here, first arg was arg1
  PID TTY           TIME CMD
71143 ttys008    0:00.01 MyScript ./script arg1

That's almost there. The argv[0] is MyScript like I want, but there's that extra arg ./script in there which is a consequence of executing the shell directly (rather than via the OS's #! processing). Unfortunately, I don't know how to get any better than this.

Update for Bash 5.0

Looks like Bash 5.0 adds support for writing to special variable BASH_ARGV0, so this should become far simpler to accomplish.

(see release announcement)

I've had a chance to go through the source for bash and it does not look like there is any support for writing to argv[0].