As a process is in execution, its state may change. The state is the current activity of the process.
New: when the process is being created
Ready: waiting to be assigned to a processor
Running: instructions are being executed
Waiting: waiting for a signal or I/O operation
Terminated: finished execution
When it starts running, it can either complete its operations, be interrupted or start waiting. If it gets interrupted, it will return to the ready state. If it must wait, then kills itself for a temporary while, while it waits for a signal, after which it returns to the ready state
Each process’ Process Control Block(PCB) block helps with this