What does “?” status in htop mean?

Question

I see ? in the S column of htop output. But the man page only has the following states.

What does ? mean?

STATE (S) 
     The state of the process:
        S for sleeping (idle)
        R for running
        D for disk sleep (uninterruptible)
        Z for zombie (waiting for parent to read its exit status)
        T for traced or suspended (e.g by SIGTSTP)
        W for paging

score -2 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 11 '24 at 20:44

check out this explanation

https://dwaves.de/2024/11/10/gnu-linux-libvirtd-hanging-zombie-process-htop-and-ps-how-to-find-all-zombie-processes-list-of-htop-process-states-and-list-of-possible-kill-signals/

or also this:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18470215/what-does-a-c-process-status-mean-in-htop

What does “?” status in htop mean?

1 Answers1