Comment by pranshuparmar 5 days 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.
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 :-)
Is that not `whatis`?
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.
I left a different comment, but I think this is good. You're example is 3306 and has a useful breakdown. Not everyone has that port memorized by trauma, and not every mysql instance uses that port.
New tools are always welcome, and having a purpose to explain a purpose seems like a good pitch.
Totally. Just to clarify, witr isn’t limited to ports. You can run it directly on a process too, like `witr mysql`. I used the 3306 example to emphasize this use case.
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