Lsofgraph – Convert lsof output to graph of processes, pipes, fifos and sockets | Hacker News Reader

Lsofgraph – Convert lsof output to graph of processes, pipes, fifos and sockets

github.com

180 pointszevv17 comments

I made python version: https://github.com/akme/lsofgraph-python

Hah, I wrote something very, very similar to this recently. The problem I eventually had with it was that lsof wasn't always installed on the hosts I was working with. So, it turned into a script to parse through /proc and other nonsense.

https://github.com/red-bin/lsofer/blob/master/lsofer.sh

(wish I could paste the graphing code, but it's code I wrote at my company.)

Cool! More interesting, I didn’t know the dot utility for creating the visual representations of the graphs. I can think of a bunch of uses for that.

dot (part of graphviz) is super handy.

Thank you for referencing the package dot is in!

I use it for project management:

https://zwischenzugs.com/2017/12/18/project-management-as-co...

systemd-analyze(1) supports dot(1) output to plot dependencies between units:

Quoting from the man page:

    EXAMPLES FOR DOT
       Example 1. Plots all dependencies of any unit whose name starts with "avahi-daemon"

           $ systemd-analyze dot 'avahi-daemon.*' | dot -Tsvg > avahi.svg
                 $ eog avahi.svg

       Example 2. Plots the dependencies between all known target units

           systemd-analyze dot --to-pattern='*.target' --from-pattern='*.target' | dot -Tsvg > targets.svg
           $ eog targets.svg

I wish I had this when I started my career. I would have well slept more.

I might be missing something here, but shouldn't the graph be directed (processes opening fifos in read-only mode, or even unidirectional pipes like on Linux)? Or is it something impossible to query with lsof?

It otherwise is a very neat graphical overview of the state of a system!

afaik that info is not available from lsof, but I'm open to suggestions if there is more sensible data to extract from the output.

Slide 12 here[1] shows that lsof distinguishes the read and write ends of FIFOs at least. For TCP I suppose I makes sense to check which end uses ephemeral port.

[1] https://github.com/nh2/strace-pipes-presentation/blob/master...

True, info for FIFOs can be derived from lsof output, update follows.

That info is available. If a pipe fd is open for reading, then that's the fd for reading...

Now we just need to combine this with lstopo.

Waiting for your github posting (:

Cool! What's it's license?

Just added the LICENSE file, 2 clause BSD

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