Linux in a Nutshell, 6th Edition

Job Control

Job control lets you place foreground jobs in the background, bring background jobs to the foreground, or suspend (temporarily stop) running jobs. Many job-control commands take a jobID as an argument. This argument 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).

%-

Previous job.

The following job-control commands are described more completely in the section Built-in Commands in Built-in Commands.

bg

Put a job in the background.

fg

Put a 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.)