Show HN: Witr – Explain why a process is running on your Linux system

157 pointsposted 9 hours ago
by pranshuparmar
(github.com)

22 Comments

mh-

2 hours ago

This is great. Small, trivial suggestion: the gif that loops in the README should pause on the screen w/ the output for a few seconds longer - it disappears (restarts) too quickly to take in all of the output.

Neywiny

an hour ago

I would also argue it shouldn't be a gif. It's nice that it shows the command is fast I guess but it's one command that's still visible in the final frame. Not as bandwidth efficient and agreed I can't read it all in time

stavros

2 hours ago

https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs is a really good utility for automatically making these gifs.

sestep

31 minutes ago

I'm a big fan of svg-term myself: https://github.com/marionebl/svg-term-cli

stavros

9 minutes ago

Hm, very interesting! This only converts asciinema recordings, though, right? It doesn't automatically record anything?

sestep

3 minutes ago

If you have asciinema already installed then you can invoke it through svg-term like this!

  svg-term --command 'cowsay hey there'
But that has the aforementioned issues about not pausing enough, so I usually just record with asciinema first and then invoke svg-term.

pranshuparmar

9 hours 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.

dcminter

4 hours ago

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.

---

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

be_erik

an hour ago

If you're looking to build and install this from source, here's the incantation:

CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -ldflags "-X main.version=dev -X main.commit=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD) -X 'main.buildDate=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)'" -o witr ./cmd/witr

Call me old-fashioned, but if there's an install.sh, I would hope it would prefer the local src over binaries.

Very cool utility! Simple tools like these keep me glued to the terminal. Thank you!

techsystems

2 hours ago

I'm really loving this!

'Responsibility chain' will become a trendy phrase.

wyldfire

34 minutes ago

`ps uaxf` gives me pretty similar output.

4ggr0

4 hours ago

i definitely see the use for it, lots of moments where i wonder how or why something was started.

TheCraiggers

3 hours ago

This is amazing. Thank you for sharing this.

Do you have any qualms about me making an entry in the AUR for this?

giancarlostoro

3 hours ago

Im not the author but I would love for an AUR made for this ;)

My favorite thing about arch is how insanely quickly AURs pop up for interesting tools.

q2dg

4 hours ago

pstree doesn't answer the why?

dontdieych

4 hours ago

Nice and installed then starred.

Saris

5 hours ago

This looks very handy to have around!