PS(1)

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
acid(1), db(1), kill(1)