From "man ps":
R = Running or Runnable
S = interruptable Sleep
T = sTopped
Z = Zombie
D = uninterruptible sleep (usually IO)
Where does this D come from?
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Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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aosho235
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1"D"ormant comes to mind – MelBurslan Mar 03 '16 at 20:51
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3_D_isk, I believe – Jeff Schaller Mar 03 '16 at 20:56
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1@JeffSchaller with all due respect, not all I/O is "disk" bound. – MelBurslan Mar 03 '16 at 20:59
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@Mel - granted; Disk is just my mnemonic for it. This Q might benefit from a 'history' tag, as it may have just been down to the most reasonable remaining choice by the 'ps' programmer. – Jeff Schaller Mar 03 '16 at 21:40
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2@MelBurslan Nonetheless, that's where it comes from. (“Device” would be more technically accurate but not historically correct). – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Mar 03 '16 at 23:44
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From the 4BSD ps man page:
The state is given by a sequence of four letters, e.g. ``RWNA''. The first letter indicates the runnability of the process: R for runnable processes, T for stopped processes, P for processes in page wait, D for those in disk (or other short term) waits, S for those sleeping for less than about 20 seconds, and I for idle (sleeping longer than about 20 seconds) processes.
Mark Plotnick
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