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

Re:Show HN: Witr – Explain why a process is running on your ... by pranshuparmar on Friday December 26, 2025 @10:21AM (#46392925)

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.

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Re:Show HN: Witr – Explain why a process is running on your ... by dcminter on Friday December 26, 2025 @03:03PM (#46395636)

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

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Re:Show HN: Witr – Explain why a process is running on your ... by filterfish on Friday December 26, 2025 @11:29PM (#46399153)

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 :-)

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Re:Show HN: Witr – Explain why a process is running on your ... by ajb on Saturday December 27, 2025 @04:46AM (#46400535)

If you have its path, dpkg already has an option to do that: "dpkg -S". Although some extra logic is needed for symlinks.

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Re:Show HN: Witr – Explain why a process is running on your ... by darrenf on Saturday December 27, 2025 @03:27AM (#46400180)

Is that not `whatis`?

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/whatis.1.html

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Re:Show HN: Witr – Explain why a process is running on your ... by pranshuparmar on Saturday December 27, 2025 @06:41AM (#46401101)

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.

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Re:Show HN: Witr – Explain why a process is running on your ... by scrame on Saturday December 27, 2025 @01:08PM (#46403781)

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.

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Re:Show HN: Witr – Explain why a process is running on your ... by pranshuparmar on Sunday December 28, 2025 @07:28AM (#46410597)

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.

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