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On a Mac, 64 bit, osx 10.8.5, two of my ps aux output lines, plus the header, are ;

$ ps aux | head
USER          PID  %CPU %MEM      VSZ    RSS   TT  STAT STARTED      TIME COMMAND
myuid       16402   0.0  0.0  2432768    600 s005  R+    9:57PM   0:00.00 grep mongo
myuid       16071   0.0  0.1  3045380  20036 s001  S+   10:13PM   0:00.51 mongo --nodb

I cannot find any documentation on the STAT, status, column. What do the items mean and/or how can I research this further?

Things that didn't help; Wikipedia ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ps_%28Unix%29 Another poster on a similar question here got no replies; https://superuser.com/questions/723080/linuxfedora-what-does-these-stats-column-mean-for-ps-aux-command

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  • Your question inspired me to use ps like this for ultimate readability: ps |head n 1 && ps aux |grep my_app, thanks!
    – benjaminz
    Sep 13, 2017 at 16:23

2 Answers 2

5

from a linux system (man ps):

           D    uninterruptible sleep (usually IO)
           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

in addition:

           <    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
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  • Mac OS X does not use Linux and has a separate manpage, which I've linked to below.
    – hd1
    May 31, 2016 at 0:24
3

From the OSX man page:

ps (1)

Table of Contents Name

ps - process status

Synopsis

ps [-aCcefhjlMmrSTuvwx] [-O fmt] [-o fmt] [-p pid] [-t tty] [-U username] ps [-L]

Description

ps displays a header line followed by lines containing information about your processes that have controlling terminals. This information is sorted by controlling terminal, then by process ID.

The information displayed is selected based on a set of keywords (see the -L -O and -o options). The default output format includes, for each process, the process' ID, controlling terminal, cpu time (including both user and system time), state, and associated command.

The process file system (see procfs(5) ) should be mounted when ps is executed, otherwise not all information will be available.

The options are as follows:

-a Display information about other users' processes as well as your own.

-c Change the ``command'' column output to just contain the executable name, rather than the full command line.

-C Change the way the cpu percentage is calculated by using a raw'' cpu calculation that ignoresresident'' time (this normally has no effect).

-e Display the environment as well.

-f Show commandline and environment information about swapped out processes. This option is honored only if the uid of the user is 0.

-h Repeat the information header as often as necessary to guarantee one header per page of information.

-j Print information associated with the following keywords: user, pid, ppid, pgid, sess, jobc, state, tt, time and command.

-L List the set of available keywords.

-l Display information associated with the following keywords: uid, pid, ppid, cpu, pri, nice, vsz, rss, wchan, state, tt, time and command.

-M Print the threads corresponding to each task.

-m Sort by memory usage, instead of by process ID.

-O Add the information associated with the space or comma separated list of keywords specified, after the process ID, in the default information display. Keywords may be appended with an equals (``='') sign and a string. This causes the printed header to use the specified string instead of the standard header.

-o Display information associated with the space or comma separated list of keywords specified. Keywords may be appended with an equals (``='') sign and a string. This causes the printed header to use the specified string instead of the standard header.

-p Display information associated with the specified process ID.

-r Sort by current cpu usage, instead of by process ID.

-S Change the way the process time is calculated by summing all exited children to their parent process.

-T Display information about processes attached to the device associated with the standard input.

-t Display information about processes attached to the specified terminal device.

-U Display the processes belonging to the specified username.

-u Display information associated with the following keywords: user, pid, %cpu, %mem, vsz, rss, tt, state, start, time and command. The -u option implies the -r option.

-v Display information associated with the following keywords: pid, state, time, sl, re, pagein, vsz, rss, lim, tsiz, %cpu, %mem and command. The -v option implies the -m option.

-w Use 132 columns to display information, instead of the default which is your window size. If the -w option is specified more than once, ps will use as many columns as necessary without regard for your window size.

-x Display information about processes without controlling terminals. A complete list of the available keywords are listed below. Some of these keywords are further specified as follows:

%cpu The cpu utilization of the process; this is a decaying average over up to a minute of previous (real) time. Since the time base over which this is computed varies (since processes may be very young) it is possible for the sum of all %CPU fields to exceed 100%.

%mem The percentage of real memory used by this process. flags The flags associated with the process as in the include file :

P_ADVLOCK 0x00001 Process may hold a POSIX advisory lock

P_CONTROLT 0x00002 Has a controlling terminal

P_INMEM 0x00004 Loaded into memory

P_NOCLDSTOP 0x00008 No SIGCHLD when children stop

P_PPWAIT 0x00010 Parent is waiting for child to exec/exit

P_PROFIL 0x00020 Has started profiling

P_SELECT 0x00040 Selecting; wakeup/waiting danger

P_SINTR 0x00080 Sleep is interruptible

P_SUGID 0x00100 Had set id privileges since last exec

P_SYSTEM 0x00200 System proc: no sigs, stats or swapping

P_TIMEOUT 0x00400 Timing out during sleep

P_TRACED 0x00800 Debugged process being traced

P_WAITED 0x01000 Debugging process has waited for child

P_WEXIT 0x02000 Working on exiting

P_EXEC 0x04000 Process called exec

P_NOSWAP 0x08000 Another flag to prevent swap out

P_PHYSIO 0x10000 Doing physical I/O

P_OWEUPC 0x20000 Owe process an addupc() call at next ast

P_SWAPPING 0x40000 Process is being swapped

lim The soft limit on memory used, specified via a call to setrlimit(2) . lstart The exact time the command started, using the ``%c'' format described in strftime(3) .

nice The process scheduling increment (see setpriority(2) ). rss the real memory (resident set) size of the process (in 1024 byte units). start The time the command started. If the command started less than 24 hours ago, the start time is displayed using the %l:ps.1p'' format described in strftime(3) . If the command started less than 7 days ago, the start time is displayed using the%a6.15p'' format. Otherwise, the start time is displayed using the ``%e%b%y'' format.

state The state is given by a sequence of letters, for example, RWNA''. The first letter indicates the run state of the process: D Marks a process in disk (or other short term, uninterruptible) wait. I Marks a process that is idle (sleeping for longer than about 20 seconds). R Marks a runnable process. S Marks a process that is sleeping for less than about 20 seconds. T Marks a stopped process. Z Marks a dead process (azombie''). Additional characters after these, if any, indicate additional state information:

  • The process is in the foreground process group of its control terminal. < The process has raised CPU scheduling priority.

    The process has specified a soft limit on memory requirements and is currently exceeding that limit; such a process is (necessarily) not swapped. A the process has asked for random page replacement (VA_ANOM, from vadvise(2) , for example, lisp(1) in a garbage collect).

E The process is trying to exit.

L The process has pages locked in core (for example, for raw I/O).

N The process has reduced CPU scheduling priority (see setpriority(2) ).

S The process has asked for FIFO page replacement (VA_SEQL, from vadvise(2) , for example, a large image processing program using virtual memory to sequentially address voluminous data).

s The process is a session leader.

V The process is suspended during a vfork.

W The process is swapped out.

X The process is being traced or debugged.

tt An abbreviation for the pathname of the controlling terminal, if any. The abbreviation consists of the three letters following /dev/tty, or, for the console, con''. This is followed by a-'' if the process can no longer reach that controlling terminal (i.e., it has been revoked).

wchan The event (an address in the system) on which a process waits. When printed numerically, the initial part of the address is trimmed off and the result is printed in hex, for example, 0x80324000 prints as 324000. When printing using the command keyword, a process that has exited and has a parent that has not yet waited for the process (in other words, a zombie) is listed as <defunct>'', and a process which is blocked while trying to exit is listed as''. Ps makes an educated guess as to the file name and arguments given when the process was created by examining memory or the swap area. The method is inherently somewhat unreliable and in any event a process is entitled to destroy this information, so the names cannot be depended on too much. The ucomm (accounting) keyword can, however, be depended on.

Keywords

The following is a complete list of the available keywords and their meanings. Several of them have aliases (keywords which are synonyms).

%cpu percentage cpu usage (alias pcpu)

%mem percentage memory usage (alias pmem)

acflag accounting flag (alias acflg) command command and arguments cpu short-term cpu usage factor (for scheduling)

flags the process flags, in hexadecimal (alias f)

gid the effective gid

inblk total blocks read (alias inblock)

jobc job control count

ktrace tracing flags

ktracep tracing vnode

lim memoryuse limit

logname login name of user who started the process

lstart time started

majflt total

minflt total page reclaims

msgrcv total messages received

There's more at the link, I just got lazy when formatting the whole thing.

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  • 1
    The link is dead.
    – Danijel
    Oct 11, 2019 at 7:08

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