SAMS Teach Yourself Red Hat® Fedora™ 4 Linux® All in One

Keeping Your Shell Programs Under Control

In upcoming chapters we're going to be running fairly involved applications at the console, and you'll be using editors like vi and emacs to work on documents and write shell scripts (small shell programs). Before we reach that point, it's important that you know about shell-based job control.

You can log in to several virtual consoles simultaneously to run more than one full-screen application at a time—for example, an emacs on console one and a vi on console two. Switching back and forth between virtual consoles, however, can be both confusing and clumsy. And you may have noticed that even if you start emacs from a Terminal window, you can't actually use the command line in that terminal window until ...