I am looking for a command in Unix that returns the status of a process(active, dead, sleeping, waiting for another process, etc.)
is there any available?
A shell script maybe?
Try pflags <pid>, which will give you per-thread status information. Example:
root@weetbix # pflags $$ 3384: bash data model = _ILP32 flags = ORPHAN|MSACCT|MSFORK /1: flags = ASLEEP waitid(0x7,0x0,0xffbfefc0,0xf) sigmask = 0x00020000,0x00000000
Also check out the manpage for pflags to see other useful tools like pstack, pfiles, pargs etc.