Statuses and Their Meanings

user99099099 · 02-06-2007, 04:11 PM

I've used Linux for some time and while I'm not expert I do have a question I've been pondering. When running the ps command, what do the statuses displayed refer to? By that I mean S, SN, S<, S<s, Ssl, Ss, Ss+, Rl, and R+. Any information's definitely appreciated.

chadl · 02-06-2007, 05:11 PM

Try the command:

Code:

man ps

The answer is on lines 556-578:

Quote:

PROCESS STATE CODES
Here are the different values that the s, stat and state output specifiers
(header "STAT" or "S") will display to describe the state of a process.
D Uninterruptible sleep (usually IO)
R Running or runnable (on run queue)
S Interruptible sleep (waiting for an event to complete)
T Stopped, either by a job control signal or because it is being traced.
W paging (not valid since the 2.6.xx kernel)
X dead (should never be seen)
Z Defunct ("zombie") process, terminated but not reaped by its parent.

For BSD formats and when the stat keyword is used, additional characters may
be displayed:
< high-priority (not nice to other users)
N low-priority (nice to other users)
L has pages locked into memory (for real-time and custom IO)
s is a session leader
l is multi-threaded (using CLONE_THREAD, like NPTL pthreads do)
+ is in the foreground process group

pixellany · 02-06-2007, 05:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by woverko

I've used Linux for some time and while I'm not expert I do have a question I've been pondering. When running the ps command, what do the statuses displayed refer to? By that I mean S, SN, S<, S<s, Ssl, Ss, Ss+, Rl, and R+. Any information's definitely appreciated.

This is all listed on the man page---man ps.
ps appears to be one of the "messier" commands.....