Job Control
Job control lets you place foreground jobs in the background, bring background jobs to the foreground, or suspend running jobs. All modern Unix systems—including Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and BSD systems—support it, so the job control features are automatically enabled. Many job control commands take a jobID as an argument, which can be specified as follows:
% n | Job number n |
% s | Job whose command line starts with string s |
%? s | Job whose command line contains string s |
%% | Current job |
%+ | Current job (same as above) |
% | Current job (same as above) |
%- | Previous job |
The shell provides the following job control commands. For more information on these commands, see the section Built-in Commands.
- bg
Put the current job in the background.
- fg
Put the current job in the foreground.
- jobs
List active jobs.
- kill
Terminate a job.
stty tostop
Stop background jobs if they try to send output to the terminal. (Note that stty is not a built-in command.)
- suspend
Suspend a job-control shell (such as one created by su).
- wait
Wait for background jobs to finish.
CTRL-Z
Suspend a foreground job. Then use bg or fg. (Your terminal may use something other than
CTRL-Z
as the suspend character, but this is unlikely.)
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