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Witr

Explain why a process is running on your Linux system

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Hi HN,I built a small Linux CLI tool called witr (Why Is This Running?).The idea came from a situation most of us have hit: you log into a machine, see a process or port running, and immediately wonder why it exists, who started it, and what is keeping it alive right now.witr traces a process, service, or port back to its origin and responsibility chain and explains it in a way that’s quick to read, especially when you’re debugging under pressure.This is v0.1.0. It’s intentionally small and focused. Feedback, criticism, and edge cases are very welcome.Repo: https://github.com/pranshuparmar/witr

HN · launched Dec 26, 2025 · 526 upvotes (top 1%) · 0 views

Niche: digital investigation and diagnostic software · 69 launches, 10 in the last 7 days ▲ +43% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Horizontal
  • Dev tools
  • Developer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

More like this: all 69 launches in digital investigation and diagnostic software →

Could you build this?

Yes This is a Linux CLI tool that inspects the /proc filesystem, systemd dbus APIs, and socket statistics to format a trace of parent processes and services.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: lsof command-line tool, systemctl with PID queries, htop tree view, Visual Studio IDE, Eclipse IDE

Concerns raised: Reliability of /proc-based tools on compromised systems, Unclear utility compared to existing alternatives

Feature requests: AUR package needs update to latest version

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 113 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #2 of 114 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 45 days after the earliest competitor.

  • portopsy · ph · 2026-09-19 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43
  • whyd · github · 2026-10-09 · 63 upvotes · similarity 0.42
  • Port Zero · hn · 2026-07-27 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.41
  • Opservo · ph · 2026-10-02 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.41
  • Bor · hn · 2026-08-02 · 197 upvotes · similarity 0.40
  • WhyHot · ph · 2026-10-07 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.40
  • wib - What is that bash? · ph · 2026-11-05 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.40
  • prt · ph · 2026-10-11 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.40

Related data

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