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Macintosh Terminal Pocket Guide
book

Macintosh Terminal Pocket Guide

by Daniel J. Barrett
June 2012
Beginner
227 pages
5h 43m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Macintosh Terminal Pocket Guide

Shell Job Control

jobs

List your jobs.

&

Run a job in the background.

^Z

Suspend the current (foreground) job.

suspend

Suspend a shell.

fg

Unsuspend a job: bring it into the foreground.

bg

Make a suspended job run in the background.

All shells have job control: the ability to run programs in the background (multitasking behind the scenes) and foreground (running as the active process at your shell prompt). A job is simply the shell’s unit of work. When you run a command interactively, your current shell tracks it as a job. When the command completes, the associated job disappears. Jobs are at a higher level than OS X processes (discussed in Viewing Processes); OS X knows nothing about them. They are merely constructs of the shell. Some important vocabulary about job control is:

Foreground job

Running in a shell, occupying the shell prompt so you cannot run another command

Background job

Running in a shell, but not occupying the shell prompt, so you can run another command in the same shell

Suspend

To stop a foreground job temporarily

Resume

To cause a suspended job to start running again

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449328962Errata Page