process-sentinel

Process Sentinel

A lightweight process inspection and management tool for system administrators and DevOps engineers. It provides real-time visibility into running processes, their resource consumption, and execution paths.

Features

• Process Snapshot – Capture a full tree of running processes with PID, PPID, CPU, and memory usage.
• Command Line Inspection – Retrieve the exact command line arguments of any process.
• Environment Dump – Extract environment variables of a selected process for debugging.
• Binary Path Resolution – Locate the executable associated with a given PID.
• Signal Forwarding – Send standard UNIX signals to processes via a safe wrapper.

Installation

Copy the process_sentinel.py script to a directory in your PATH and make it executable:

chmod +x process_sentinel.py

Usage

./process_sentinel.py --action <ACTION> [--pid <PID>] [--filter <REGEX>]

Actions

Action	Description
list	Show all processes matching the filter (default: all).
info	Display detailed info (cmdline, env, path) for a given PID.
signal	Send a signal (default: SIGTERM) to a PID.
tree	Print a process tree in ASCII format.

Examples

# List all processes named python
./process_sentinel.py --action list --filter "python"

# Show full info for PID 1234
./process_sentinel.py --action info --pid 1234

# Send SIGKILL to PID 5678
./process_sentinel.py --action signal --pid 5678 --signal 9

Security Notes

• All actions are read-only except signal, which requires explicit --signal and --pid arguments.
• The tool uses only standard library modules and does not make any network connections.
• Environment variable dumps are only returned when --action info is used with an explicit PID.

Exit Codes

Code	Meaning
0	Success
1	Invalid arguments
2	Process not found
3	Permission denied
4	Unexpected error

License

MIT License – see the LICENSE file for details.