on Linux/x86, ps -l command gives a long listing. Field WCHAN in the listing caught my interest.
-bash-2.05b# ps -l
F S UID PID PPID C PRI NI ADDR SZ WCHAN TTY TIME CMD
4 S 0 21597 21595 0 76 0 - 1096 wait4 pts/2 00:00:00 bash
4 R 0 21677 21597 0 80 0 - 794 - pts/2 00:00:00 ps
looking at the man page, I could find out what it displays -
WCHAN address of the kernel function where the process is sleeping (use wchan if you want the kernel function name). Running tasks will display a dash (’-’) in this column.
‘ps -l’ uses System.Map file for reading the symbols.
Filed under: technical
Hi,
hmmm… Well i came by your blog entry while trying my best to find out what those fields exactly mean? I typed “man ps” as well but couldn’t find the descriptions… Can’t say i read the whole manual page anyway
But according to what i found out, “WCHAN” stands for waiting channel and it means: “The address of an event on which the process is waiting”. This I got from the following site. “http://www.linux-tutorial.info”.. U wudn’t know what the others mean do you… If you do can you drop a comment at my blog please?
Thanks…
TC