Question about process states, ps and GDB

[Baruch Siach]

Hi Dan,

On Sun, Dec 02, 2012 at 02:57:30PM +0200, Dan Shimshoni wrote:

[...]

> Starting program: /work/dev/t/sec/hello
> 
> Breakpoint 1, main () at hello.c:7
> 7	for(i=0; i < 10; i++)
> Missing separate debuginfos, use: debuginfo-install glibc-2.15-58.fc17.x86_64
> (gdb)
> 
> Now with "ps aux | grep hello" I see two processes:
> root     10310  0.0  0.7 196432 15188 pts/1    S+   14:42   0:00 gdb
> --quiet hello
> root     10333  0.0  0.0   4108   344 pts/1    t    14:44   0:00
> /work/dev/t/sec/hello
> 
> S is for  Interruptible sleep
> 
> I assume that the "t" is for process state of "TRACED". Am I right?

As far as I know the state letters come from the third field in the 
/proc/<pid>/stat file. A more verbose version of this field appears in the 
/proc/<pid>/status file (look for 'State:'). According to task_state_array[] 
(fs/proc/array.c in the kernel sources) 't' translates into "tracing stop", 
while 'T' is just "stopped".

baruch

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