Add Windows process listing command ps

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#54 1 comment 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
38/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
powershell, rust
Domain
cli, operating-systems

Research direction

Start by locating the existing Windows kill command and the PSReadLine rewrite list mentioned in the issue. Review the Windows API approach and settle the supported listing, filtering, and formatting options; done means a native ps command works without external binaries and bare ps is routed to ps.cmd in interactive PowerShell.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

C-feature P-backlog P-low

Summary

Users asking for kill also asked for a simple ps command, since terminating a process by PID is much easier when there is a native way to list processes first.

This came up in #45:

ps is not GNU coreutils, so this should probably be treated as a Windows-specific convenience command rather than part of the strict coreutils set.

Proposed behavior

Add a small native Windows ps implementation that lists running processes, for example:

ps
ps -A
ps -e
ps aux
ps -p <PID>
ps --ppid <PID>
ps -o pid,ppid,comm

A minimal output could include PID, parent PID, and process image name. A few common filtering/formatting options would make it useful together with kill.

This should be implemented with Windows APIs rather than wrapping Sysinternals tools, so the package does not depend on external binaries.

For PowerShell integration, ps should also be added to the PSReadLine rewrite list so bare ps can be routed to ps.cmd in interactive PowerShell sessions, even though Get-Command ps may still show the built-in PowerShell alias.

Dominant language
Rust
Stars
5.2k
Forks
107
Avg merge
2d 19h
Merged PRs (30d)
4

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