To monitor the state of your processes use the ps command.
ps [-option]
Used without options this produces a list of all the processes owned by you and associated with your terminal.
Options for this command vary with the type of UNIX system that you are using. Consult the man page for the ps command to check which command options are available on your UNIX.
It may be that you are running more than one terminal session on the system and/or that you have processes which have no controlling terminal associated with them. This is likely if you are working within a networked windowing environment such as X.
To display details about all the processes which belong to you use one of the following commands:
ps -u your_user_name
ps -x