How to find sleeping process in Ubuntu?

Is there any way to find sleeping processes in Ubuntu?

I can see top can list out number of sleeping processes, but I want them to be listed with their name.

Are there any commands for that?

4 Answers

Try this:

ps o state,command axh | grep "^[SD]" | cut -b 3-

for listing commands of processes with an interruptable and uninterruptable sleep state.

ps outputting only state and commands of all processes (ax) and h removes the header line.
grep filters processes other than the two sleep states
cut is used to remove the state output again.
Optionally replace command with ucmd if you don't need the full name including all arguments.

This is probably suboptimal scripting here, but I couldn't find a quick way to have ps filtered for a specific state.

You could grab the information from top, which can be run in batch mode (-b).

top -bn1 | awk 'NR > 7 && $8 ~ /S|D/ { print $12 }'

Possible states are, from top(1):

 'D' = uninterruptible sleep 'R' = running 'S' = sleeping 'T' = traced or stopped 'Z' = zombie

ps -e S

will show you sleeping processes.

Using awk and ps

ps o pid,state,command | \ awk ' {if ($2 == "T") {printf "%s\t%s\t%s\n","Sleeping",$1,$3};}'

Example

Start mc in a terminal, open a new terminal and start the commands below

kill -STOP $(pgrep mc)
ps o pid,state,command | \ awk ' {if ($2 == "T") {printf "%s\t%s\t%s\n","Sleeping",$1,$3};}'

Output is

Sleeping 21668 mc