Witr Process Inspector

When you're debugging a server and see an unfamiliar process or port listener, witr answers "why is this running?" without forcing you to correlate ps, lsof, systemctl, and docker ps yourself. It traces the full causality chain from a PID or port back through parent processes, systemd units, containers, and shell sessions. The TUI mode gives you a live dashboard, while the JSON output makes it scriptable for audits. Works across Linux, macOS, Windows, and FreeBSD. Honestly, this is one of those tools that should probably be built into the OS but isn't, so someone made it in Go instead. Requires elevated permissions for system processes, which makes sense but means you'll be typing sudo more than you'd like.

skills.sh installs: 1.2K
GitHub stars: 61
last updated: Jul 14, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add aradotso/trending-skills --skill witr-process-inspector --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

witr — Why Is This Running?

Skill by ara.so — Daily 2026 Skills collection.

witr is a Go CLI/TUI tool that answers "why is this running?" for any process, service, or port. Instead of leaving you to correlate ps, lsof, ss, systemctl, and docker ps manually, witr makes the causality chain explicit — showing where a running thing came from, how it was started, and what chain of supervisors/containers/shells is responsible.

Installation

Quickest (Unix)

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pranshuparmar/witr/main/install.sh | bash

Quickest (Windows PowerShell)

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pranshuparmar/witr/main/install.ps1 | iex

Package Managers

# Homebrew (macOS/Linux)
brew install witr

# Conda
conda install -c conda-forge witr

# Arch Linux (AUR)
yay -S witr-bin

# Windows winget
winget install -e --id PranshuParmar.witr

# Windows Scoop
scoop install main/witr

# Alpine / apk
sudo apk add --allow-untrusted ./witr-*.apk

# Go source install
go install github.com/pranshuparmar/witr/cmd/witr@latest