Rptree – Debugging Tool for Realtime Process Tree Events, Pipes, Etc.

I've been working on this tool for a couple of weeks to try and help students in a course on operating systems. They had a task to implement a shell, and it was kind of tricky viewing the processes that their shell makes using top/htop. Lots of them also struggled with setting up pipes properly.

Hence, this tool shows a realtime updating view of the process tree under a given PID, as well as a history log so you don't miss fleeting process executions. It also shows which files are used for each process' stdin and stdout (and, configurably, stderr), as well as information about process groups (which is useful for understanding signal delivery).

I've got some good feedback on this tool from some of the students I actually designed it for, and I'm wondering if it can help anyone else?

Let me know if there are any missing features (a bit of a wishlist is going on at the bottom of the readme already!) Maybe more importantly, there must be some bugs, so if you come across any please let me know!