Using csh & tcsh

Changing a Job's State

A job can be moved from one state (foreground, background, or suspended) to any other state. The commands used to manipulate jobs are listed in Table 15-1; %j designates the job on which you wish to operate. fg, bg, kill, and stop can take multiple job specifier arguments, each of which is processed in turn. Table 15-2 shows the various forms that %j can take.

Table 15-1. Job Control Commands

Command	Effect of Command
CTRL–Z	Stop the foreground job
CTRL–C	Interrupt (terminate) foreground job
fg %j	Bring stopped or background job to foreground
bg %j	Move stopped job to background
kill %j	Kill (terminate) stopped or background job
stop %j	Stop background job
suspend	Suspend current shell (if non-login shell)
jobs	Display current job list

Table 15-2. Job Specifiers

Specifier	Job to Which the Specifier Refers
%	Current job (%+ and %% are synonyms for %)
%–	Previous job
%n	Job number n
%str	Job whose command line begins with str
%?str	Job whose command line contains str

You can often refer to a job more easily by name than by number, although %str and %?str are ambiguous if they match more than one job in your job list. When such a situation occurs, the shell provides warning. For example, our job list includes two jobs beginning with vi and two jobs containing reference.ms. As a result, the following commands are ambiguous:

% fg %vi
%vi: Ambiguous.
% fg %?ref
%?ref: Ambiguous.

If you use %?str to refer to a job and the shell responds with No match, the shell is interpreting the ? as ...