pspy

pspy watches /proc and uses inotify filesystem watchers to detect processes — including short-lived ones — without requiring root privileges. It's particularly useful for spotting cron jobs, scripts run by other users, and other ephemeral commands that ps would miss.

Features

• No root required — works entirely from user space
• Catches short-lived processes that disappear before ps can see them
• Combines procfs polling with inotify triggers for efficiency
• Watches configurable directories recursively or non-recursively
• Colored output to distinguish UIDs and process types
• Configurable scan intervals for tuning CPU usage vs. detection speed
• Ships as a static binary with no runtime dependencies

Availability

Available on Linux.