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In windows 7's task manager, we can get a short description of a running process:

See this (Picture source)

Can we get something similar?

One way could be to create a script, which will search the man pages or in the internet for all processes. Is there any better way?

It would be better, if I can get these features in gnome-system-monitor or in KSysGuard

A possible duplicate, but it seems to be cumbersome....

Abir Ganguly
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  • Hi there, the way you've phrased this is seems more like a feature request than a question. If that's the case, you might have better luck discussing it on the application's github page. – Jeremy Jul 08 '20 at 06:57
  • I think it is not in standards that you can provide a description to a process while creating it. Should I ask for changing GNU/linux standards? Or to add a feature to gnome-system-monitor? Or to create a new app to fetch description for a process? I think the best way would be to list out every processes we don't know and search each one of them....... – Abir Ganguly Jul 08 '20 at 09:51

3 Answers3

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I use Kubuntu 18.04 and 20.04. The process monitor (accessed by Control-Esc) shows me this. Is that what you want. You can then sort by cpu, process etc. enter image description here

Some commandline alternatives like cat /proc/{PID}/status are listed in the answers and comments of this question.

walttheboss
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  • It is easy to get command for a certain process, but I want to get a good "description". You may understand what each process does by guessing from it's command, but this is not the case for all other processes. For example I use Linux Mint, some of the processes are(from $USER): (sd-pam), gvfsd, csd-a11y-settings, csd-wacom, nm-applet, polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1, goa-identity-service. I have very little idea about these processes, and I need to search man pages or internet for these. My goal is to learn what each processes does in my computer. – Abir Ganguly Jul 08 '20 at 04:42
  • Now about cat /proc/{PID}/status. I am not interested in knowing status of a process. I want to know why is it there in the first place, in a smoother way. – Abir Ganguly Jul 08 '20 at 04:47
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Linux doesn't require processes to give a human-readable description, so there is no such thing, sorry.

Your best bet for finding out what a process does would be to simply search for it online (Google etc).

ashvatthama
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Windows does this by reading properties of the PE that was run.

This is uncommon if at all supported by ELF so no, I wouldn't expect this to be possible without an auxiliary database on Linux. A tool that determines what package the binary belongs to and shows that package's description at best (don't know of any though).

Ginnungagap
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