What does a C process status mean in htop?

Question

I am using htop on osx and I can't seem to find out what a 'C' status in the 'S' status column means for a process status.

What does a C process status mean in htop?

Answer 1

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, either by a job control signal or because it is being traced.
• 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.

Source: man ps

I recently came across a second list:

• R Running
• S Sleeping in an interruptible wait
• D Waiting in uninterruptible disk sleep
• Z Zombie
• T Stopped (on a signal) or (before Linux 2.6.33) trace stopped
• t Tracing stop (Linux 2.6.33 onward)
• W Paging (only before Linux 2.6.0)
• X Dead (from Linux 2.6.0 onward)
• x Dead (Linux 2.6.33 to 3.13 only)
• K Wakekill (Linux 2.6.33 to 3.13 only)
• W Waking (Linux 2.6.33 to 3.13 only)
• P Parked (Linux 3.9 to 3.13 only)

http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/proc.5.html in the "/proc/[pid]/stat" section:

Answer 2

htop author here. I am not aware of such status code in the htop codebase. Keep in mind that htop is written for Linux only, so there is no support for macOS/OSX. When I hear of people running it on OSX they are often using an outdated, unsupported fork (the latest version of htop is 2.0.1, including macOS support).