Process States

A process is a state machine.

In this interactive Linux lesson from Stencel Academy you don't just read — you type real commands like sleep 30 &, kill -STOP 4821, kill -CONT 4821, wait and watch the machine respond on a live, animated map. It is part of the free How Linux Works course.

Before this lesson

Builds on: fork() & exec().

What you'll practise

• jobs — List background jobs and their state.
• ps -o stat,comm — STAT codes: R run, S sleep, T stopped, Z zombie.
• cat /proc/4821/status — The kernel exposes state under /proc.

Terms you'll learn

Check your understanding