Here's from the man of ps: The ">" or "<" are normal.

         Additional characters after these, if any, indicate

additional

         state information:



         +       The process is in the foreground process group of

its

                 control terminal.

         <       The process has raised CPU scheduling priority.

         >       The process has specified a soft limit on memory

require-

                 ments and is currently exceeding that limit; such a

                 process is (necessarily) not swapped.

         A       the process has asked for random page replacement

                 (VA_ANOM, from vadvise(2), for example, lisp(1) in

a

                 garbage collect).

         E       The process is trying to exit.

         L       The process has pages locked in core (for example,

for

                 raw I/O).

         N       The process has reduced CPU scheduling priority

(see

                 setpriority(2)).

         S       The process has asked for FIFO page replacement

(VA_SEQL,

                 from vadvise(2), for example, a large image

processing

                 program using virtual memory to sequentially

address

                 voluminous data).

         s       The process is a session leader.

         V       The process is suspended during a vfork.

         W       The process is swapped out.

         X       The process is being traced or debugged.

Kent C. Brodie - brodie at phys.mcw.edu

Department of Physiology

Medical College of Wisconsin

(414) 456-8590