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

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witr (why-is-this-running)

1. Purpose

witr exists to answer a single question:

Why is this running?

When something is running on a system—whether it is a process, a service, or something bound to a port—there is always a cause. That cause is often indirect, non-obvious, or spread across multiple layers such as supervisors, containers, services, or shells.

Existing tools ( ps , top , lsof , ss , systemctl , docker ps ) expose state and metadata. They show what is running, but leave the user to infer why by manually correlating outputs across tools.

witr makes that causality explicit.

It explains where a running thing came from, how it was started, and what chain of systems is responsible for it existing right now, in a single, human-readable output.

2. Goals

Primary goals

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