procinfo

A portable process inspector for Linux and macOS. Get details about any running process instantly!

Also see procinfo_minimal.sh - pure sh implementation of procinfo.

Installation

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wenekar/procinfo/main/procinfo.sh -o procinfo
chmod +x procinfo
sudo mv procinfo /usr/local/bin/

Or just copy the script. It's a bash script with no dependencies beyond standard Unix tools (ps, lsof, pgrep). Or better yet, copy parts of it, combine them, make one script that satisfies your specific needs!

Features

• Cross-platform - Works on Linux and macOS (no Windows?)
• Zero dependencies - Except for bash and standard Unix tools, and maybe an operating system.
• Process tree - See all parents of a given process. (shocking!)
• Environment inspection - See ENV variables for a given process (-V or --env)
• Systemd integration - If a process belongs to a .service, shows the path to that .service file.
• SSH integration - Instantly see the user@IP of the ssh-session that started the process.
• git integration - Does the process belong to a git repo? See the branch, and remote URL directly in the output.
• Docker aware - Detects containers, composes, container-id, image name, port bindings... May add more info later.
• Network info - Shows all listening ports for a process.
• Port list - Pretty ss -tunlp output for everyone!
• Lock detection - Shows lock files and open files of the process.
• Multiple formats - Human-readable, short one-liner, or JSON
• Case-insensitive - procinfo nginx matches Nginx, NGINX, etc.
• TUI mode with fzf - Turns out, fzf is kinda awesome! Beware, this is not a top replacement, it's meant to be used to see open ports, not all processes.

Requirements

procinfo:

• A UNIX-like system
• bash
• ps
• lsof
• pgrep

Optional dependencies:

• docker
• git
• systemctl
• whatis (included with man)
• jq (json output support)
• fzf (TUI mode)

procinfo_minimal:

• sh

Usage

# Interactive TUI mode (requires fzf)
procinfo --tui

# By process name
procinfo nginx

# By port
procinfo --port 3306

# By PID
procinfo --pid 1234

# One-line output
procinfo --short nginx

# JSON output (requires jq)
procinfo --json nginx

Example Output

Target      : godot

Process     : godot.linuxbsd. (pid 234167)
User        : wenekar
Command     : ./bin/godot.linuxbsd.editor.x86_64 --verbose
Started at  : Wed Dec 31 19:12:10 2025
Running for : 1 minute, 6 seconds
RSS Memory  : 330 MB

Process tree:
  systemd (pid 1) → systemd (pid 1141) → konsole (pid 1725) → fish (pid 233851) → godot.linuxbsd. (pid 234167)

Source      : interactive fish shell
git info    : godot (fix-libdecor-ssd-fallback) - [email protected]:wenekar/godot.git
Working Dir : /mnt/Sandisk480/GitHub/godot
Open files  : /memfd:kwin-xkb-keymap-shared
              /memfd:wayland-cursor

Docker Container

When inspecting a port bound to a Docker container:

Target      : port 6379

Process     : docker-proxy (pid 31782)
User        : root
Command     : /usr/bin/docker-proxy -proto tcp -host-ip 0.0.0.0 -host-port 6379 -container-ip 172.18.0.2 -container-port 6379 -use-listen-fd
Started at  : Wed Dec 31 01:45:01 2025
Running for : 17 hours, 28 minutes, 39 seconds
RSS Memory  : 6 MB

Process tree:
  systemd (pid 1) → dockerd (pid 25817) → docker-proxy (pid 31782)

Source      : container runtime
git info    : not found
Working Dir : /
Listening   : *:6379

Docker info :
  Container : redis (463ab2f88502)
  Image     : redis
  Compose   : backend_test (/home/wenekar/backend_test/docker-compose.yml)
  Internal  : 172.18.0.2:6379

Docker cheatsheet:
  docker logs redis
  docker exec -it redis sh
  docker top redis
  docker ps //see all containers

Options

Option	Description
-p, --port <port>	Find process listening on port
-P, --pid <pid>	Inspect specific PID
-a, --all-ports	List all listening ports
-t, --tui	Interactive TUI mode (requires fzf)
-s, --short	One-line output (just the process chain)
-j, --json	JSON output (requires jq)
-d, --description	Wait for process description (slow on macOS)
--no-color	Disable colored output
-h, --help	Show help
-v, --version	Show version

Why?

I saw an ad on TikTok about a project called witr, link to said TikTok video. Then I thought to myself, who is the target user? Who is that binary for? Isn't this just a bash wrapper of ps -p?

Thus came procinfo, turns out, I am that target user. Also see issue 32.

License

MIT