Unix Third Edition: Visual Quickstart Guide

Suspending Jobs

Suppose you’ve just started a job that requires no input from you—say, downloading multiple files with ftp—and you suddenly realize that you’ve got to finish something else right now. Instead of waiting for the files to download or stopping the job completely, you can instead just suspend the job and resume it later (Code Listing 9.5). In doing so, you can make the Unix system work your way— that is, you don’t lose the progress you’ve made toward getting the job done, and you can do the other stuff you need to do as well.

Code Listing 9.5. Suspending jobs is just like pushing the Pause button on your CD player.

[ejr@hobbes ejr]$ ftp calvin.raycomm.com Connected to calvin.raycomm.com. 220 calvin Microsoft FTP Service → (Version ...