What do the STAT column values in ps mean?

Question

In the STAT column of ps there are a load of letters that don't really make much sense. What do they mean?

Here's an example of ps aux | head:

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root         1  0.0  0.0  27176  2960 ?        Ss   Sep20   0:02 /sbin/init
root         2  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Sep20   0:00 [kthreadd]
root         3  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Sep20  13:05 [ksoftirqd/0]
root         5  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   Sep20   0:00 [kworker/0:0H]
root         7  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   Sep20   0:00 [kworker/u:0H]
root         8  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Sep20   2:16 [migration/0]
root         9  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Sep20   0:00 [rcu_bh]
root        10  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Sep20  20:08 [rcu_sched]
root        11  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Sep20   0:07 [watchdog/0]
root        12  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Sep20   0:05 [watchdog/1]
root        13  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Sep20   2:21 [ksoftirqd/1]
root        14  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Sep20   1:00 [migration/1]

Answer 1

man ps has all the answers, under the "PROCESS STATE CODES" heading:

PROCESS STATE CODES

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)
I    Idle kernel thread
R    running or runnable (on run queue)
S    interruptible sleep (waiting for an event to complete)
T    stopped by job control signal
t    stopped by debugger during the tracing
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

For BSD formats and when the stat keyword is used, additional characters may be displayed:

<    high-priority (not nice to other users)
N    low-priority (nice to other users)
L    has pages locked into memory (for real-time and custom IO)
s    is a session leader
l    is multi-threaded (using CLONE_THREAD, like NPTL pthreads do)
+    is in the foreground process group