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 ~490 lines of bash with no dependencies beyond standard Unix tools (ps, lsof, pgrep).

Usage

# 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      : port 5432

Process     : postgres (pid 1234)
User        : postgres
Command     : /usr/lib/postgresql/15/bin/postgres -D /var/lib/postgresql/15/main
Started at  : Wed Dec 25 10:30:00 2025
Running for : 4 days, 6 hours, 23 minutes
RSS         : 128 MB

Why It Exists :
  systemd (pid 1) → postgres (pid 1234)

Source      : systemd service
Working Dir : /var/lib/postgresql/15/main
Listening   : 127.0.0.1:5432
              *:5432
Open Files  : 45 of 1024 (4%)
Locks       : /var/lib/postgresql/15/main/postmaster.pid

Extra info  :
  - Process is listening on a public interface

Features

• Cross-platform - Works on Linux and macOS
• Zero dependencies - Just bash and standard Unix tools
• Process ancestry - Shows the full chain of how a process came to exist
• Source detection - Identifies systemd, launchd, Docker, pm2, cron, SSH, etc.
• Network info - Shows all listening ports for a process
• Lock detection - Shows lock files held by the process
• Multiple formats - Human-readable, short one-liner, or JSON
• Case-insensitive - procinfo nginx matches Nginx, NGINX, etc.

Options

Option	Description
-p, --port <port>	Find process listening on port
-P, --pid <pid>	Inspect specific PID
-s, --short	One-line output (just the process chain)
-j, --json	JSON output (requires jq)
--no-color	Disable colored output
-h, --help	Show help
-v, --version	Show version

Why?

I saw an ad on TikTok of this link to said TikTok video written in Go with 4k+ GitHub stars. 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, also see issue 32.

License

MIT