A system administrator is troubleshooting a slow server and notices that a custom application process appears to be stuck. The application is supposed to write a large amount of data to a network-attached storage (NAS) device. The process is not consuming any CPU cycles but is unresponsive to signals. The administrator uses the ps aux command to investigate. Which process state code in the STAT column indicates that the process is in an uninterruptible sleep, likely blocked while waiting for an I/O operation?
The correct answer is D. In the output of the ps command, the D state code represents an uninterruptible sleep. This state is most commonly seen when a process is blocked waiting for an I/O operation, such as reading from or writing to a disk or network storage, and it cannot be interrupted by signals.
S represents an interruptible sleep, where the process is waiting for an event to complete but can still be woken up by a signal.
Z represents a zombie or defunct process, which has completed execution but is still in the process table waiting for its parent process to read its exit status.
R means the process is either running or on the run queue, ready to be executed.
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