NAME

ps, psu - process status

SYNOPSIS

ps [ -pa ]

psu [ -pa ] [ user ]

DESCRIPTION

Ps prints information about processes. Psu prints only information about processes started by user (default $USER).

For each process reported, the user, process id, user time, system time, size, state, and command name are printed. State is one of the following:

Moribund

Process has exited and is about to have its resources reclaimed.

Ready

on the queue of processes ready to be run.

Scheding

about to be run.

Running

running.

Queueing

waiting on a queue for a resource.

Wakeme

waiting for I/O or some other kernel event to wake it up.

Broken

dead of unnatural causes; lingering so that it can be examined.

Stopped

stopped.

Stopwait

waiting for another process to stop.

Fault

servicing a page fault.

Idle

waiting for something to do (kernel processes only).

New

being created.

Pageout

paging out some other process.

Syscall

performing the named system call.

no resource

waiting for more of a critical resource.

wchan

waiting on the named wait channel (on a Unix kernel).

With the -p flag, ps also prints, after the system time, the baseline and current priorities of each process.

The -a flag causes ps to print the arguments for the process. Newlines in arguments will be translated to spaces for display.

SOURCE

/bin/ps
/bin/psu

SEE ALSO