Pierre,
You'll occasionally see a command like
$ SHOW PROCESS/CONTINUOUS
return an error "Process is suspended", when the process is in a resource wait state, rather than in true SUSP state.
That's because the failure status from a $GETJPI on such a process is SS$_SUSPENDED. The definition of the state is
"The specified process is suspended or in a miscellaneous wait state, and the requested information cannot be obtained."
Jur's list of states looks complete as of latest version, V8.3, but be aware that some of these are fairly recent additions, so more may be added in future.
Explanation: Some (limited) information about processes can be determined from the "outside", everything else requires asking the process. The target process must execute a kernel AST to gather the information and return it to the requester. A process in SUSP or any of the resource wait states cannot execute this code, and therefore cannot return the extended information.
Unfortunately, the design decision in $GETJPI was to lump all these states together and call them all "suspended". This is confusing and misleading, but that's just the way it is.
If you want to list just the processes that are in "true" SUSP state, try:
PIPE SHOW SYSTEM/STATE=(SUSP,CUR) | -
(SHOW SYSTEM/NOPROCESS ; SEARCH SYS$PIPE " SUSP "/EXACT) | -
SEARCH SYS$PIPE "%SEARCH-I-NOMATCHES"/MATCH=NOR
(getting this to work for all cases is a bit ugly, and expensive. See if you can work out the reason for all the apparently extraneous stuff. There are still pathological cases where it will do strange things)
A crucible of informative mistakes
