What is a stopped process in linux?

It means the process has received a STOP signal, and won't do anything much until it receives a CONT signal, not even terminate.

The most common source of STOP signals is the user hitting ^z while the process is in the foreground, and the common way to send a CONT afterwards is typing fg or bg which continue the process in the foreground and background respectively.

Another way to send STOP to a process is kill -STOP $pid. Similarly, CONT can be sent to a process with kill -CONT $pid.

Since you sent TERM signals to the processes, I assume you want them to terminate. For that to happen, the processes must receive CONT signals. You can send those by typing kill -CONT 8754 8767 in a terminal window.


The stopped process in Linux/Unix is a process/task which received suspend signal (SIGSTOP/SIGTSTP) which tells kernel to not perform any processing on it as it has been stopped, and it can only be resume its execution if it is sent the SIGCONT signal.

Basically stopped process awaits a continuation signal from the kernel, similarly as suspended process awaits a wake-up condition from the kernel.

Linux kernel process states: Ready, Running, Stopped, Suspended, Traced, Zombie

Image credits: polytechnique.fr


Each process in Linux kernel is represented by a task_struct data structure and each task vector consist array of pointers to every task_struct. which describes a process or task in the system (either it's unrunnable, runnable or stopped). See: Processes and Linux Data Structures) for more details.

See also: The Linux Kernel: Process Management