Keep tabs on your running processes

If you’re having problems with a malicious process or suspect your system may have been infected by a trojan, a tool like WhatsOpen may help you get to the bottom of it.

WhatsOpen is a handy utility designed to do everything that Activity Monitor can do and a little bit more. What I like most about WhatsOpen is the way it allows you to close those processes and applications that your system blocks from doing, when it claims that they are in-use. The reason for this is because a disk image or file may be in use by Spotlight or some other system process that you’re simply not aware of.

When you first compile a list, WhatsOpen can take a while to bring up the results, but when it does, you have a thorough list of everything running on your system with the user they’ve been assigned to, file size, CPU Time, path, and process state. You can filter processes by name, work in root or user modes, and even search instantly in Google to find out what running processes may be. You can also pause running processes, which is useful for diagnosing problems although it may make other programs unstable.

WhatsOpen is an interesting tool for those who check their running processes regularly or suspect their system is infected.

Changed superuser glyph to an open padlock to keep it uniform with icons.Enabled killing processes as the superuserReworked authentication systemEnabled pause/resume as superuserUpdated button labels to reflect superuser killEnabled superuser in force ejectAdded support for PathFinderFixed a bug that showed all files when sorting columns with a file type filter enabledFixed a bug that caused a column header display incorrect sorting (Thanks JBirkenmaier for reporting this)Re-aligned main window to trim bottom status bar width

Changes

• Changed superuser glyph to an open padlock to keep it uniform with icons.Enabled killing processes as the superuserReworked authentication systemEnabled pause/resume as superuserUpdated button labels to reflect superuser killEnabled superuser in force ejectAdded support for PathFinderFixed a bug that showed all files when sorting columns with a file type filter enabledFixed a bug that caused a column header display incorrect sorting (Thanks JBirkenmaier for reporting this)Re-aligned main window to trim bottom status bar width