Unix Third Edition: Visual Quickstart Guide

Running Jobs in the Background with bg

If you’re running a job that doesn’t require input from you, consider running it in the background using bg (Code Listing 9.7). In doing so, you can keep the program running while working on other Unix activities at the same time.

Code Listing 9.7. Restarting suspended jobs in the background lets you do two things—or more—at once. To move a job to the background, just type bg followed by % and the job number.

[ejr@hobbes ejr]$ jobs [3]- lynx http://www.raycomm.com/ & → calvin.raycomm.com [2] Stopped (tty input) telnet [3] Stopped (signal) lynx → http://www.raycomm.com/ [4]+ Stopped man telnet [ejr@hobbes ejr]$ bg %3 [3]- lynx http://www.raycomm.com/ & [ejr@hobbes ejr]$

To run jobs in the background with ...