mjhjmtu

The controlling terminal output of ps lists things "Ss+". How can I determine what these codes mean? I tried looking through the ps manual, which is a 30-page document, I found no explanation.

From man ps:

PROCESS STATE CODES
 Here are the different values that the s, stat and state output specifiers (header "STAT" or "S") will display to describe the state of a process:

 D uninterruptible sleep (usually IO)
 R running or runnable (on run queue)
 S interruptible sleep (waiting for an event to complete)
 T stopped by job control signal
 t stopped by debugger during the tracing
 W paging (not valid since the 2.6.xx kernel)
 X dead (should never be seen)
 Z defunct ("zombie") process, terminated but not reaped by its parent

 For BSD formats and when the stat keyword is used, additional characters may be displayed:

 < high-priority (not nice to other users)
 N low-priority (nice to other users)
 L has pages locked into memory (for real-time and custom IO)
 s is a session leader
 l is multi-threaded (using CLONE_THREAD, like NPTL pthreads do)
 + is in the foreground process group

Look for the tt column from ps output and use tty command like so:

$ps ax |more
 PID TT STAT TIME COMMAND
 1 ?? Ss 4:58.84 /sbin/launchd
 66 ?? Ss 1:05.03 /usr/sbin/syslogd
 67 ?? Ss 0:21.62 /usr/libexec/UserEventAgent (System)


$ps ax |grep bash
81939 s000 S+ 0:00.09 -bash
82152 s001 S 0:00.04 -bash
82228 s001 S+ 0:00.00 grep -I bash


$tty
/dev/ttys001


$ps ax |grep offlineimap-load
82261 s000 S+ 0:00.02 /bin/bash /Users/pbarganski/Documents/bin/offlineimap-load
82417 s001 R+ 0:00.01 grep -i offlineimap-load

From the above, tty command tells me which terminal I am currently in - terminal 's000' in this case.

From the last command, you'll notice that the grep -i command was run from terminal s001, my current terminal window, however, the offlineimap-load script is running from controlling terminal s000 - my first terminal session - which in this case, is simply the first tab terminal in terminal.app.