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)

I Idle kernel thread

R running or runnable (on run queue)

S interruptible sleep (waiting for an event to complete)

T stopped by job control signal

t stopped by debugger during the tracing

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