Comment by pranshuparmar
1 day ago
A quick note on scope: this is not meant to replace existing monitoring or observability tools. It’s designed for those moments when you SSH into a box and need to quickly understand “why is this running” without digging through configs, cron jobs, or service trees manually.
Happy to answer questions or adjust direction based on feedback.
This is very clever. I've often needed to figure out what some running process was actually for (e.g. because it just started consuming a lot of some limited resource) but it never occurred to me that one could have a tool to answer that question. Well done.
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Edit: Ah, ok, I slightly misunderstood - skimmed the README too quickly. I thought it was also explaining what the process did :D Still a clever tool, but thought it went a step further.
Perhaps you should add that though - combine Man page output with a database of known processes that run on various Linux systems and a mechanism for contributing PRs to extend that database...? Unlesss it's just me that often wants to know "what the fsck does /tmp/hax0r/deeploysketchyd actually do?" :P
Looking up the binary in the package management system would also provide another source of useful information. Of course this would dramatically increase the complexity but would, I think, be useful.
If you could look it up using APT/dpkg first, that would be lovely :-)
If you have its path, dpkg already has an option to do that: "dpkg -S". Although some extra logic is needed for symlinks.
Thanks, glad you liked it! As @darrenf mentioned, `whatis` can help with that use case. For now, I’m keeping `witr` focused on explaining PIDs.
Is that not `whatis`?
https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/whatis.1.html