pstree-json

@readwithai - X - blog - machine-aided reading - 📖⚡️🖋️

An easily-installable command-line to output the process tree in machine readable format. Suitable for pasting into an LLM.

Warning. This is ai-generated and I cannot guarantee to not changing the options! If people use it I may freeze it but don't use it in automated scripts unless you are freezing.

Motivation

Do you ever get a feeling like "what is wrong with the world". It feels very odd that this tool does not exist, so I am creating it.

Having a tree in JSON format makes it a lot easier to do things like find a processes parents and child etc. Using programmatic tools and grep to interact with a process tree particular useful when you have a lot of processes.

Installation

You can install pstree-json using pipx:

pipx install pstree-json

Usage

To list processes us pstree-json.

pstree-json $PID

You likely want to use a combination of gron or json-leaves (written by the author) together with grep to search what is going on with tress and jq to then extract desired information.

Attribution and prior work

This tool is a wrapper around the psutil library - but is useful from the shell.

You might like to use pgtree which combines pg with pstree to show a process tree. You can use pstree - but this did not show me enough information.

pgtree-tui provides a tui for interactive wit hthe process tree.

About me

I am @readwithai. I create tools for reading, research and agency sometimes using the markdown editor Obsidian.

I also create a stream of tools that are related to carrying out my work.

I write about lots of things - including tools like this - on X. My blog is more about reading and research and agency.