I am making a call to ps in order to monitor the program I am running.
Many of the command line terms that are returned are in the books, I
can interpret them, but some are not. Listed below are sample command
lines returned from the call of 'ps l -U myid'. If someone could help
to interpret them for me, I would appreciate it. I would also like
to know where I can reference the meaning of the calls directly.
(note: this is not an assignment.)

The script I am running is making multiple serial calls to run a java
program.

Here are sample lines from 'ps l -U myid'.

F UID PID PPID PRI NI VSZ RSS WCHAN STAT TTY TIME COMMAND
5 . . . . . . . select SN ? . myid@pts/0
what does the flag setting for five indicate, and where can I find the
list of flags and what they mean? What does select mean? What is @pts/0

F UID PID PPID PRI NI VSZ RSS WCHAN STAT TTY TIME COMMAND
0 . . . . . . . rt_sig SN pts/0 . -csh
What is rt_sig, and why is pts/0 under TTY?

F UID PID PPID PRI NI VSZ RSS WCHAN STAT TTY TIME COMMAND
0 . . . . . . . wait4 SN pts/0 . /bin/sh
../myscript
I am ok with this line

F UID PID PPID PRI NI VSZ RSS WCHAN STAT TTY TIME COMMAND
0 . . . . . . . - RN pts/0 . java
myprogram
The java program is the program being run by my script.
Why does WCHAN only have a bar, and no other text

F UID PID PPID PRI NI VSZ RSS WCHAN STAT TTY TIME COMMAND
1 . . . . . . . poll SN pts/0 . java
myprogram
What does poll mean? and what is the flag meaning of 1?

F UID PID PPID PRI NI VSZ RSS WCHAN STAT TTY TIME COMMAND
1 . . . . . . . nanosl SN pts/0 . java
myprogram
What does nanosl mean?

Thanks
j.

jkaufman@shaw.ca (jk) wrote:
>I am making a call to ps in order to monitor the program I am running.
>Many of the command line terms that are returned are in the books, I

The trick to finding descriptions of the terms is to follow an
implied instruction in the man page.  Read the man pages in the
SEE ALSO list at the end of the man page.  (This is true of many
man pages...  when you don't find what you are looking for, look
at the list of related documentation for something likely to
provide the detail you need.)

In the case of the ps(1) man page, it lists,

   SEE ALSO
   top(1) pgrep(1) pstree(1) proc(5)

And the man page for top(1) has either a detailed description of
each of the header labels, or it tells where to find the detail.

For example, your question about the dash under WCHAN, is
explained along with the description of what WCHAN means.  And
the F column for flags, is explained but the reader is referred
to /usr/include/linux/sched.h for specific code values.

--
Floyd L. Davidson           <http://web.newsguy.com/floyd_davidson>
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)                         floyd@barrow.com